Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!unido!materna!elwood!tb From: tb@Materna.DE (Torsten Beyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell Subject: Re: NFS Support in NetWare Message-ID: Date: 6 Mar 91 14:55:46 GMT References: <1991Feb27.210937.3761@novell.com> Sender: root@Materna.DE Lines: 46 keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) writes: >> Nfsd processes have their own context but run >>in the kernel's address space. In other words, "everything is in kernel >>space" on a UNIX NFS server, too. That is, one which is based on the Sun >>reference kernel implementation (read: almost every single one.) >Yes, I know that too, but being a general purpose OS, UNIX has a great >deal more to worry about when it switches contexts than we do. Simply >put, no provisions were made in NetWare v3.11's scheduling algorithm to >attempt to provide prompt service to a frustrated spreadsheet user >sitting on the end of a tty whos just punched the recalc key after sitting Maybe you are right, BUT in a networked environment usually NFS-Server ONLY do NFS. That is these NFS-Server do not have to care about any frustrated whatsoever users. They just answer NFS-calls. And even if they had to. I have done quiete some NFS testing and benchmarking and usually the bottleneck in NFS performance was disk throughput. Nothing but that. Put a slow CPU (read 68020/68030) in a box add a really fast I/O subsystem and you get a heck of an NFS-Server. And I realy doubt your 400 NFS-ops/sec numbers. When it comes to writing NFS gets real slooow. Unless you do tricky things like the Legato ppl, or violate the NFS protocol you HAVE to do synchronous disk-writes. And that's a real mess. >I purposely didn't mention some of the other advantages we have in the area >of disk throughput. We could spend a great deal of time debating the >advantages/disadvantages of our Cached FAT/Turbo FAT disk access methods >over the UNIX inode/indirect block access method, but lets do it privately Add me to that list :-). Concerning Turbo-whatsoever file acces. Do you really think this is a problem for a server with enough Memory (= cache)?. I'm not convinced that this is so important. The amount of blocks you can read in a given time to me seems to the most important factor. Don't stop this discussion here as it starts to interest me..... ciao -Torsten -- Torsten Beyer e-mail : tb@Materna.DE Dr. Materna GmbH VOX : +49 231 5599 225 Vosskuhle 37 FAX : +49 231 5599 100 D-4600 Dortmund 1, West Germany