SUMMARY: NFS performance is lousy

Thanks to the following who responded: Kevin Buterbaugh, Michael 
DeSimone, J. Carlos Castro, Charles Homan, David Foster, Karl Vogel, 
Tristan Ball,  John Cronin, L RaguNath,  Tim Chipman and Carl Carpenter

The three main suggestions were to a) tweak the system TCP and IP 
parameters b) Bump up the number of nfsd processes from 16 to 512 and 
tweak the read and write buffer sizes on the NFS mount command  c) try 
gigbit connection between both hosts Spreading the load over a number of 
mount points was also suggested, and it was pointed out that part of NFS 
in the kernel in Solaris 7 which would also lead to contention

I'm going to try option b) first then a) followed by option c) (This 
will require a card for the E450).

We may, hoever,  discard NFS as an option if performance isn't 
acceptable enough, and look at Veritas Cluster File system as an final 
option to allow access to the SAN file system concurrently from both hosts.

Thanks again for your input everyone. I will summarise again with my 
findings.

Scotty


--------------------------------- Original -----------------------------

This question is a follow-on to a posting I made a while back regarding 
what turned out to be the rather unwise practice of mounting a HP XP512 
SAN file system on two machines - one R/O and the other R/W.

It was pointed out to me that the standard UFS file system does not 
support this kind of activity, and it was suggested I use a file system 
which supports this type of shared access.

The environment is a Sun E450 (Solaris 7) and a SunFire V880 (Solaris 
8), both of which are connected to an HP XP512 SAN via JNI Fibre HBA 
cards. I want to be able to read and write from one host (The V880) to 
the file system on the XP 512, and only read the same file system on the 
E450. R/W on both hosts would be an obvious bonus

Which of the Veritas products are needed to make this work? Just VxFs? 
Veritas cluster?

The other alternative is Suns QFS file system. Is SAM-QFS needed?

Any experiences with either of these file systems in this type of shared 
environment?
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