Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!uupsi!cmcl2!panix!zink
From: zink@panix.uucp (David Zink)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: NFS and slow links
Keywords: ls hangs
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.224903.19356@panix.uucp>
Date: 28 Feb 91 22:49:03 GMT
Sender: zink@panix.uucp (David Zink)
Followup-To: comp.unix.internals
Organization: PANIX - Public Access Unix Systems of NY
Lines: 16

dsamperi@Citicorp.COM (Dominick Samperi) writes:
> 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

Actually I have observed some related interesting lil' things.
First and foremost, though was when I was working on a compression
program. I would execute commands like (where /bin is local and ~/work
is mounted from a twin machine with NFS):
$ cd work
$ cat /bin/* | ncmpress > ./filename &
$ ls -l
The ls would hang until the ncmpress program completed (about five minutes).
In scheduling theory we call this 'starvation'. I don't know if this
is true for all versions, ours was HP-UX between two HP-PA boxes.

-David Zink