NFS and slow links

[David Zink]

dsamperi at Citicorp.COM (Dominick Samperi) writes:
> We have observed a significant performance hit when links are done
> over the network (via NFS). At first I thought this was due to the

Actually I have observed some related interesting lil' things.
First and foremost, though was when I was working on a compression
program. I would execute commands like (where /bin is local and ~/work
is mounted from a twin machine with NFS):
$ cd work
$ cat /bin/* | ncmpress > ./filename &
$ ls -l
The ls would hang until the ncmpress program completed (about five minutes).
In scheduling theory we call this 'starvation'. I don't know if this
is true for all versions, ours was HP-UX between two HP-PA boxes.

-David Zink