NFS tuning - high performance throughput.

["M. Todd Smith" <todd@sohovfx.com>]

Hello all,

I've been attempting to get a better hold over our NFS performance as 
our network grows and grows.

We've recently upgraded our NFS server machine to a dual 3.2ghz Xeon 
running Fedora Core 3 (kernel 2.6.11-1.14_FC3smp) w/ 4Gb RAM.  Coupled 
with this machine we have a 2 Broadcom NetExtreme 2 Port PCI-X NIC on 
its own PCI-X bus (133Mhz).  Attached to this machine is our fibre 
channel SAN, using Seagate fibre-channel drives and an LSI dual channel 
2gigabit fibre adapter on its own PCI-X bus.  Local RW is ~135Mbytes/sec.
 
The 4 ports are trunked together using bonding (balanced round robin 
mode), and trunked together on our Extreme Networks Summit 400i switch.  
All the test machines are attached to this switch, making everything 
within one hop and ping times of less than a 200 nanoseconds.

Current test machine is running Suse 9.2 and has an Intel 100/1000 XT 
server adapter (e1000 driver) on a shared but not high traffic PCI bus.  
Other test machines include some Dell PowerEdge 1850's with onboard 
Intel NICs, and some Apple G4, G5 and Xserves.

I have read most of the tuning guides I can find on the net and 
attempted just about everything I can get my hands on (I have not tried 
jumbo frames yet, still waiting for some downtime to attempt that).  My 
problem is that no matter how I tune the machines I can get at max 
45Mb/ps throughput on NFS.  This was the same throughput we were getting 
with our old server with PCI cards, moreover this throughput is roughly 
the same for every machine on our network.  Theoretically we should be 
able to get much higher values.

Any idea as to why this is?  I can provide config files and such if 
needed, but I'm really at a loss as to where to start.

Cheers
Todd

-- 
Systems Administrator
----------------------------------
Soho VFX - Visual Effects Studio
99 Atlantic Avenue, Suite 303
Toronto, Ontario, M6K 3J8
(416) 516-7863 
http://www.sohovfx.com
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