dawgiestyle

11/28/04: NFS Performance on Suse 9.1

NFS performance is talked about on quite a large number of sites, but as I have just found out, Google cannot always solve one's problems. I got a lot of results where people were talking about terrible NFS write performance, which is what I was experiencing, but most of them either went unanswered or were solved by adjusting rsize and wsize mount options. I tried playing with these settings even though I knew they were fine. I was using the same mount options that I used with Gentoo and Slackware on my desktop with great performance. It was only after installing Suse 9.1 that I noticed a nasty slowdown in NFS write performance. 3MB/s on a 100Mbit lan.

I actually really like Suse, so I began desperately trying to find a solution, because if I could not find one I knew I would have to change desktop OSs yet again.

My fileserver is a Slackware 10 box with 2 NICs bonded into 1 interface, which I had done around the same time I installed Suse, so I reversed those changes, and still no luck.

There were other things I changed (kernels on server and desktop) but I won't go into them. Finally, as a last resort, I noticed "nfsvers=2" on the end of my mount options and changed it to "nfsvers=3" and bam, 8-9MB/s writes. This was about 5 minutes ago so I'm still ecstatic.

So I had to post this in case others are banging their heads against walls about it as I have been doing for a couple weeks now. I love solving problems, but its very annoying knowing that it was right in front of me the whole time. Though situations like these do wonders for troubleshooting skills :)