[Beowulf] how fast can NFS run?

Peter Kjellstrom cap at nsc.liu.se
Wed Feb 1 01:04:54 PST 2006


On Wednesday 01 February 2006 05:13, Bruce Allen wrote:
> I'd like to know the fastest that anyone has seen an NFS server run, over
> either a 10Gb/s ethernet link or a handful of link aggregated
> (channel-bonded) Gb/s ethernet lines.
>
> This would be with a small number of clients making large file sequential
> reads from the same NFS host/server.  Please assume that the NFS server
> has 'infinitely fast' disks.

First, don't hijack threads, can't you guys have any mercy on us with thread 
capable e-mail clients? ;-)

I do think that you could get NFS up over the 100 MiB/sec mark, but I also 
think it would be alot easier with lustre (www.lustre.org) since then you 
could use a few GigE connected servers and not depend on extreme speed and 
tuning on one single server...

If you go down the nfs path you might want to google on, among other things, 
NFS over rdma, NFS infiniband, ...

just my 0010 cents,
 Peter

>
> I am told by one vendor that "NFS can't run faster than 100MB/sec".  I
> don't understand or believe this.  If the server's local disks can
> read/write at 300MB/s and the networking can run substantially faster than
> 100 MB/s, I don't see any constraint to faster operation.  But perhaps
> someone on this list can provide real-world data (or say why it can't
> work).
>
> Note: I am free to use modern versions of the NFS protocol, jumbo frames,
> large rsize/wsize, etc.
>
> Cheers,
>  	Bruce

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
  Peter Kjellstrom               |
  National Supercomputer Centre  |
  Sweden                         | http://www.nsc.liu.se
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20060201/356cf62d/attachment.sig>


More information about the Beowulf mailing list