Re: strange performance issues with OS X 10.6 client

["Stefan Krüger" <stadtkind2@gmx.de>]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Stefan Krüger wrote:

> Hello list,
> 
> I have some really strange nfs performance issues
> 
> NFS server is Fedora 12, running
> * kernel-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.x86_64 and
> * nfs-utils-1.2.1-4.fc12.x86_64
> * nfs shared /home is ext4 with default mount options
> 
> /etc/exports:
> /home   192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,sync)
> 
> nfs and nfslock are up and running
> 
> Nothing else touched on the server nfs-wise.
> 
> NFS client is Mac OS X, version 10.6.3
> 
> My /home dir is automounted on the Mac with the following mount options:
> * nosuid,nodev,resvport,rdirplus,rwsize=1048576
> (nfsv3 and tcp are default, I have also tried udp, and with and without
> rdirplus, with different read/write sizes (started with 32k, less for udp,
> and then cranked it up to 1m to make the beachball appear less often), but I
> still have issues no matter which options I chose)
> 
> Anyway, I'm stuck now, surfing the web with Safari is a very unpleasant
> experience on nfs, beachball every now and then together with a huge amount
> of network traffic (RX with 20MB/s+ peaks), not unusual to see several
> gigabytes received after some minutes browsing, XCode shows a ''The
> document "SomeFile.m" could not be saved.''-error after some edits, Opera
> hangs for minutes when closing, etc etc.
> 
> It's horrible :(
> 
> Another example, extracting
> http://www.bignerdranch.com/solutions/Cocoa-3rd.tgz took over 3min!
> 
> $ time tar xzf Cocoa-3rd.tgz
> 0.169u 3.198s 5:51.10 0.9%	0+0k 1+6972io 0pf+0w
> $ time rm -rf Solutions-Cocoa-3rd/
> 0.014u 0.477s 0:45.59 1.0%	0+0k 1+1io 0pf+0w
> 
> So any help or hints really appreciated

So, no answers yet, but I did some more tests, i.e. I tried extracting the
Cocoa-3rd.tgz (2.2MB, 12MB untar'ed) on FreeBSD 8.0-REL (running inside
VMWare though), and still it was much faster (5:51.10 vs 0:09.35) than
extracting on bare metal fedora12:

$ time tar xfz Cocoa-3rd.tgz 
0.104u 1.474s 0:09.35 16.7%	0+0k 0+4896io 0pf+0w
$ time rm -rf Solutions-Cocoa-3rd
0.006u 0.160s 0:01.24 12.9%	0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

I captured the nfs traffic with tcpdump (tcpdump -i eth1 -s 0 -w nfs.out
host nfssrv and port 2049) on both freebsd8 (interface for freebsd is a bit
different ofc) and fedora12 while running

tar xfz Cocoa-3rd.tgz Solutions-Cocoa-3rd/02_GetStarted

(which extracts just a couple of files) , you can find them here:

Fedora 12 tcpdump -> http://www.dpaste.org/5cvp/
FreeBSD 8 tcpdump -> http://www.dpaste.org/uCGX/

Honestly, I don't see anything suspicious, but maybe you guys will catch
something

Anyway, if you need more info or want to me to test something else, just drop
me a line

TIA