Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!ncar!gatech!mcdchg!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS
Message-ID: <7448@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 13 Jan 89 03:48:21 GMT
References: <9018@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <7387@chinet.chi.il.us> <437@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 46

In article <437@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> rwa@auvax.uucp (Ross Alexander) writes:

>Agreed.  But, sadly, the implementations I have used (RFS over
>WIN/TCP, 10B5 network, AT&T 3B2/600's) are slower than molasses in
>January.  Maybe it doesn't have to be that way.  It sure would be nice
>if wasn't.  But Sun 3's and _small_ Vaxen's (Vaxstation 2000, anyone?)
>running NFS routinely blow the 600's out of the water, approximately
>7 :: 1 is the ratio I measure.  On the very same network...

Speed is relative -- what kind of times do you expect/actually get?
Running RFS between 3B2's over 1Mbit starlan, I have found that
loading programs or searching large directories "feels" slow but normal
data file access seems reasonable considering the usual speed of the
3B2.  Some sample times with the closest thing to a 1 meg file that
I had laying around follow. The network should have been moderately busy
with two other machines doing a tape backup.  I actually ran each copy
twice and the real times were within a couple of seconds on each run.
Note that writing to a remote file is much slower than reading.  Does
ethernet/nfs really do better? I haven't used anything but the 1Mb starlan
but the difference between local->local and remote->local doesn't seem
bad.  This isn't quite a fair sample because the local disk is the slow
32M and the remote is a faster 72M.

test file:
-rw-r--r--   1 les      other    1048576 Jan 11 09:43 testfile
+ time cp testfile testfile1            [local->local]
   real     1:01.7
   user        0.0
   sys        14.0

+ time cp testfile /afbf04/tmp/testfile   [local->remote]
   real     1:47.6
   user        0.0
   sys        31.0
+ rm testfile1 

+ time cp /afbf04/tmp/testfile testfile1  [remote->local]
   real     1:09.4
   user        0.0
   sys        32.6

Strangely enough I can copy the same file over the same network onto
a 6386 running DOS client software in about 45 sec. (faster than
a local copy on the 3B2).

Les Mikesell