Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Using NFS Effectively

The NFS protocol itself limits throughput to about 3 Mbytes/s per active client-side process because it has limited prefetch and small block sizes. The NFS version 3 protocol allows larger block sizes and other changes that improve performance on high-speed networks. This limit doesn’t apply to the aggregate throughput if you have many active client processes on a machine.

First, some references:

• Managing NFS and NIS by Hal Stern (O’Reilly)—essential reading!

• SMCC NFS Server Performance and Tuning Guide

  The SMCC NFS Server Performance and Tuning Guide is part of the SMCC hardware-specific manual set. It contains a good overview of how to size an NFS server configuration. It is updated with each Solaris release, and I think ...