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From: chucka@cup.portal.com (Charles - Anderson)
Newsgroups: alt.sys.sun,comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: how many nfsd's should I run?
Message-ID: <39547@cup.portal.com>
Date: 24 Feb 91 07:21:00 GMT
References: <28975@cs.yale.edu>
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 25

> Is there a magic formula for determining how man nfsd's to run?
> 
> "System Performance Tuning" by Loukides says "...4 is appropriate for
> most situations.  The effects of changing this number are hard to
> predict and are often counterintuitive.  For various reasons that are
> beyone the scope of this book, increasing the number of daemons can
> often degrade network performance."
> 
> The SunOS 4.1.1 man page suggests 8 nfsd's.
> 
> What happens when you run too many nfsd's?  Too few?
> 
> In our case, we're running Sun 4/390 servers, typically with 2 1 GB
> IPI disks on one controller.  Each server serves around 20
> "sorta-standalone" Sun 4/60 clients (/, swap, and /usr are on the
> client, /home is on the server).
> -- 
> Ed Anselmo   anselmo-ed@cs.yale.edu   {harvard,cmcl2}!yale!anselmo-ed

We are running 50-60 clients using DOS PCNFS and 4-6 mounts each.
We picked 16.  Seems to be working pretty well.  We have 16 Meg memory
and 1 G Disk.  I think we could get by with 12.  But, no one is 
complaining about performance, which can go down due to swapping.

Chuck Anderson


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