NFS performance problems

[Eric Markwardt]

I've recently been running some NFS performance tests between a 3/60 and a
Mips M/2000.  I've been seeing some *really* poor numbers on NFS writes,
and was wondering if anyone could explain what might be happening.

I am running the Lachman NFS test suite (same as the Sun Suite?), test5
(read/write test) in particular.  Writes were with a 10Mbyte file in 8KB
blocks. The numbers are coming out something like this when writing from
the client to the server:

   Server		Client		Writes (Kbytes/sec)
   ------		------		-------------------
   Mips M/2000		Sun 3/60 		  9
   Mips M/2000		SGI 4D/70		300
   Sun 4/110		Sun 3/60		 90
   Sun 3/60		Sun 4/110		 90
   Mips M/2000		Sun 3/160		101

   Machine		OS
   -------		--
   Mips M/2000		RISCos 4.0
   Sun 3/60		SunOS 4.0.3
   Sun 4/110		SunOS 4.0
   Sun 3/160		SunOS 3.5
   SGI 4D/70		Irix 3.1D

This sorta looks like a 4.0+ problem to me, but I'm not positive.  When my
3/60 is doing the writes, the cpu perfmeter stays below 25% utilization
and the pkts perfmeter never leaves the "32" range.  Doing reads from the
client causes the perfmeters to jump drastically.

Any information anyone might be able to provide would be greatly
appreciated.  Thanks.

Eric Markwardt                E-mail:  ewm at punjab.udev.cdc.com
Control Data Corp.            AT&T:    (612) 482-3590