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Date: Tue, 23 Dec 1997 13:13:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Evan Champion <evanc@synapse.net>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Improving NFS Performance
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I have a network with a single NFS server that shares /home to each of 4
other servers over 100baseTX.  The net is sub-1% loaded, the server is
basically idle.  /home is a high-speed array that is massively cached, and
is also basically idle.  The server is FreeBSD 2.2.5-STABLE, the clients
are BSD/OS 3.1.  All are running DEC 21140-based cards (SMC EtherPower). 

The interactive performance is fine (in that a human can't see much
difference between the performance via NFS vs. a local disk), but when it
comes to transfering files, the NFS server performs extremely poorly.

On local disks, I am able to get transfer rates in the megabytes per
second; from the NFS server, I am seeing a ceiling of about 40 _kilobytes_
per second!  It is so poor that I am actually able to see the difference
connected over ISDN, where an FTP from the server would net 15 kBps, but I
only get 9 FTP'ing from the mounted disk on one of the clients.

I have tried using tcp, nqnfs and the readahead options, all of which do
absolutely nothing performance wise.

Is there something else I can try that might work out better?  Is there an
alternative to NFS?  What about samba?

Evan