Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 02:46:07 -0500 From: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mail server setup Message-ID: <73188.921138367@gjp.erols.com>
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[ delete all trace of previous message so as not to think any one person is being picked upon ] I'm really rather astounded at the number of people here who seem to think that NFS is real solution to scaling large server farms. Its not. NFS is a gross hack. It works, sure. But it is far from the ideal solution to an internet providers problems. We've got a NFS based web server farm at work, and although I have no connection to the web department, I'm constantly beating them over the head to replace it as the machines they are using (and are pushing the limits of) could push a lot more traffic if they only had local storage. The stateless nature of NFS means that a lot of the work done to optimize the VM system and to merge in the I/O buffer cache is wasted, and you have to go to the wire for requests for the same data that you queried 10ms ago. Simply put: NFS has its place. Performance-critical systems isn't one of the areas NFS is suited for. Not unless you want to throw a lot more hardware at the problem than you really need to. Yes, this is verging on a religious argument. However, the fact that even Sun now says that NFS mounted /var/mail spools is a bad idea speaks volumes. Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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