nfs

In some of my previous posts, I spent some time attempting to squeeze out the best NFS performance as possible from OpenBSD. This time, I wanted to run a similar test, but on Linux and see if the same findings were applicable.

I found the results rather interesting, as they show that Linux is capable of faster transfer speeds than OpenBSD, with much less work. Of course, this doesn’t make me dislike OpenBSD any less (obviously), as the OS is still capable of fast transfers, and I am not building any supercomputers at my home.

My original nfstest script on OpenBSD was tweaked for use on Linux recently. While modifying the script, I realized that there were some shortcomings to my original script.

Rsync was the original transfer method; however, after some testing and research, I realized that this method may have a little more overhead than originally realized.

Part two NFS performance tuning. I have some new data to publish. I reran the full NFS test, this time with the script transferring three files, with one sync and unmount in between the three transfers. I saw more interesting behavior that is worth noting, as well as publishing the script used to compile these logs.

Recently I’ve starting using my FreeBSD server as an active NFS server again, instead of just a giant file storage system for old pictures and docs. I prefer to keep as much data on a central storage system, that way, individual client machines can be rebuilt at a moments notice with no data loss.

Until a few months ago, my home desktop was running CentOS. Now it is a OpenBSD desktop running CWM, and I have noticed that the NFS client performance didn’t seem that great compared to the old Linux desktop. So, I figured it was time for some performance testing.