Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!ccorp!dsamperi From: dsamperi@Citicorp.COM (Dominick Samperi) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs Subject: NFS and slow links Message-ID: <1991Feb26.032009.12747@Citicorp.COM> Date: 26 Feb 91 03:20:09 GMT Organization: Citicorp Lines: 33 We have observed a significant performance hit when links are done over the network (via NFS). At first I thought this was due to the fact that we are linking against several large libraries. So I copied the libraries to a local disk, and was surprised to find that it made very little difference. Further investigation revealed that what made all of the difference was whether or not the user's home directory was local or NFS-mounted. More precisely, the performance hit resulted from the need to write the output executable file (about 10Megs) to an NFS-mounted directory. Modifying the makefile so that the output executable file is written to a local ("cache") partition removed the performance hit. Surely this must be a problem that others have encountered. Does anybody have a better solution? We are using SunOS 4.1. It appears that NFS works well when one is making many small requests, say, to fetch object files from a library over the network, or to include header files from NFS-mounted directories. But there is a significant hit when NFS is used to copy a large file (or create a large executable file). One observation that I cannot explain is the fact that large executables that are located in remote (NFS-mounted) directories seem to start up quickly (faster than a straight copy). Any ideas? Thanks for any feedback on this. -- Dominick Samperi -- Citicorp dsamperi@Citicorp.COM uunet!ccorp!dsamperi Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com