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Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 17:10:50 -0500
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com>
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Subject: Re: Max NFSD processes
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In the last episode (May 19), Eric Anderson said:
> I have several heavily used NFS servers, currently running FreeBSD
> 4.9-RELEASE.  I'm getting jammed up with all my nfsd processes being
> busy, so clients see slow connections to the server.  I have the nfsd
> starting with a count of 20, which is the max set in the nfsd.c file.
> 
> Are there any risks I should be aware of before bumping up the max to 
> say 40, or even 50? 
> 
> What would it take to make this a sysctl adjustable value?
> 
> Should the max be bumped higher by default nowdays?

What's the output of "ps ax | grep nfsd"?  How much CPU does the last
nfsd process have?

If your backend storage is a RAID with lots of disks, and your last
nfsd is actually getting some use, then bumping up the nfsds will
probably help.  Although if you're hitting a kernel bottleneck (locking
for example), more nfsds won't do any good.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com