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Date:      07 Nov 2002 11:28:42 +1000
From:      Duncan Anker <d.anker@au.darkbluesea.com>
To:        BigBrother <bigbrother@bonbon.net>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: NFS Performance woes
Message-ID:  <1036632522.25128.27.camel@duncan>
In-Reply-To: <20021106114019.W69960-100000@bigb3server.bbcluster.gr>
References:  <20021106114019.W69960-100000@bigb3server.bbcluster.gr>

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On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 19:52, BigBrother wrote:
> 
> 
> Although the man page says this, I *think* that the communication is done
> like this
> 
> CLIENT <=> NFSIOD(CLIENT) <=> NFSIOD (SERVER) <=> NFSD
> 
> which menas that NFSIOD 'speak' with each other and then they pass the
> requests to NFS.
> 
> Of course if u dont need to have on the server too many NFSIOD. So in my
> case I just have 8 nfsiod on server running and most of them are idle, and
> besides, they only take 1.5MB of memory which I can afford. So I think
> having *some* NFSIOD also on server is not a bad idea. Of course on the
> server u should have a lot of NFSD.
> 
> in other words, running NFSIOD on server is not a bad idea..

NFSIOD is enabled by putting

nfs_client_enable="YES"

into rc.conf. Empirical evidence suggests that NFSIOD is not used
server-side. I ran 4 nfsiod daemons on the server and checked their
usage time. All were 0:00. If the server does any client NFS stuff it
would make a difference, and it may be different under other OS.
Certainly it does no harm to have them running.

>
> Also monitor the mbufs on all your machines (especially the server).
> 
> do from time to time a 'netstat -m' and see the peak  value of mbuf
> and mbuf clusters...if it is close to the max limit then you will suffer
> from mbuff exhaustion will will eventually make the machine unreachable
> from network.
> 
> 
> u can change mbuff max value before kernel load ...see tuning (7)

kern.nmbclusters="<value>"

in /boot/loader.conf, if anyone needs to do this. Have to reboot for
this one :-(

> 
> 
> Also if u have mbuf exhastion try to use smaller block size in NFS mounts.

Now this is interesting. I had thought mbuf cluster exhaustion was due
to a high number of connections. Although I guess a high number of
connections * large buffer size would do it too.


Thank you for your response and suggestions vis the other NFS stuff - I
managed to get our server talking UDP. The wildcard binding was the
problem, and the -h flag to nfsd fixed it.

Network usage graphs are showing the differential between incoming and
outgoing traffic to be much less now, so I would say there was a lot of
overhead in there, as well as retransmissions.

I am still playing with buffer sizes but chances are in this case the
FreeBSD default is best.

Regards

--
Duncan Anker
Senior Systems Administrator
Dark Blue Sea



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