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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Another reason I hate NFS: Silent data loss!
Message-ID: <4339.Jun1501.31.5191@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 15 Jun 91 01:31:51 GMT
Organization: IR
Lines: 14

I just ran about twenty processes simultaneously, each feeding into its
own output file in the same NFS-mounted directory. About half the data
was lost: truncated files, blocks full of zeros, etc. The NFS client and
NFS server both had load averages under 2, though I was pounding rather
heavily on the network (ten TCP connections or so a second from one
machine). The data loss was completely silent.

I know the official answer: people on Suns aren't supposed to send
twenty I/O requests in a fraction of a second. But such things will
happen occasionally on any multiuser machine. What do Sun's protocol
designers have against TCP? What do they think is so important that they
have to sacrifice TCP streams, TCP reliability, TCP efficiency?

---Dan