[brlug-general] Slow NFS on GigE

[Tim Fournet]

What does your mount command look like?


Dustin Puryear wrote:
> I'm curious if anyone has had any performance issues with NFS over GigE? 
>   We are bringing up a pretty standard VMware scenario: VMware servers 
> are connected to GigE with bonded pair and our Dell NF500 NAS is running 
> RAID10. Fast and easy. Only..
>
> The NFS performance sucks. I need to get some firm numbers, but it looks 
> like we can't get NFS to perform better than if it were on a Fast 
> Ethernet network. That said, if we change over to mounting our VM 
> filesystem using CIFS we can scream at pretty much wire speeds. (By the 
> way, if using CentOS 5.0 and mount.cifs, upgrade to 5.1 because the 5.0 
> kernel will panic sometimes with a mounted CIFS in high usage.)
>
> Here's out setup:
>
> 2 Dell 1850's CentOS 5.1 with Intel GigE cards (2 cards each, 2 ports 
> per card, 1 card = bonded pair = VMware Network, 1 card = 1 port = Admin 
> Network)
>
> 1 Dell NF500 running Windows Storage Server 2003 with 4 disk RAID10 and GigE
>
> Regardless of whether we use bonding/LAG (Dell PowerConnect 5000+) or 
> just simple GigE over one port, our NFS sucks it. CIFS screams though 
> and pretty much saturates the connection.
>
> Right now I've tested Linux <--> NAS. When I have time I'll try Linux to 
> Linux.
>
>