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From: lars@snus.matsc.kth.se (Lars Hoglund)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: NFS performance on Sun/VAX network
Keywords: NSF Sun VAX
Message-ID: <1990Nov20.150600.21829@kth.se>
Date: 20 Nov 90 15:06:00 GMT
References: <1865@diemen.utas.edu.au>
Organization: Phys. Metallurgy, KTH, Sweden
Lines: 30

In article <1865@diemen.utas.edu.au> david@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (David Nyman) writes:
>I am having problems with NFS performance on our network.  Our network
>consists of:
>
>1. Two Sun 4/330's, 
>2. One VAX 6310 with 13 DEC terminal servers, and 
>3. One Vista terminal server, supporting 16 terminals for either LAT or
>TCP/IP connections.
>
>If I NFS mount a filesystem from the Sun NFS server on the Sun NFS client,
>access to the NFS filesystem on the client is abysmally slow (up to about 20
>seconds for a 'pwd', for instance).  'nfsstat' will also report
>retransmissions and timeouts at the rate of about 30% !!  This
>performance is not always reproducible - some NFS filesystem accesses
>are normal, but most suffer with the above symptoms (this is perhaps due to
>caching).
>
>I have attempted isolating the Sun/4's from the network, and, hey presto,
>the problem goes away !!  No 'nfsstat' errors, timely responses, and all is
>rosy.  Reconnecting to the network brings the problem back.
>
>Has anyone had similar problems?  I firstly wondered if the VAX was
>swamping the network, even though it is only servicing the terminal
>servers.  I find this hard to believe, but I'm open to any suggestions.
>

I seem to remember having similiar problem with a slightly different
configuration. Our problem was caused by having a DELNI (thats what 
DEC call it) this box is not IEEE 802.3 compliant and the SUNs did have
great difficulties it was connected to the network.