Is the default red hat 5.4 NFS server multithreaded? (was: redhat-list Digest, Vol 84, Issue 10)

(Imed Chihi) عماد الشيحي imed.chihi at gmail.com
Fri Feb 11 09:19:55 UTC 2011


> Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 17:20:04 -0500
> From: Matty Sarro <msarro at gmail.com>
> To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list <redhat-list at redhat.com>
> Subject: Is the default red hat 5.4 NFS server multithreaded?
>
> Hey everyone,
> This is a pretty simple question but I can't seem to find the answer.
> I'm looking to purchase a dedicated NFS server. Most of the vendors
> are pushing quad/hex core processors. There's one model left that
> still has a dual core. So far as I can tell, the default NFS server
> isn't multithreaded, so even dual core is going to be overkill. The
> server is going to be getting Log data copied to it N times a day,
> where N is the number of times the files reach a certain size.
>
> The only other thing the server will be doing is running a cron job
> which deletes files that are more than 60 days old. Pretty simple,
> right?
> The only reason I can see justifying a quad core processor is if NFS
> is multithreaded. Thoughts?

The NFS server binary I have checked is not linked to libpthread, but
you may not need to answer the subject question in your context:  most
of the NFS work I have seen in past years seems to be on the NFS
client in areas like performance, cache consistency and protocol
efficiency.  NFS server work seems to go in the implementation of
NFSv4 and Kerberos support.  In short, I believe that whether the NFS
server is multi-threaded or not may not matter.

Under Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives, you can configure the
number of parallel NFS server processes by setting RPCNFSDCOUNT in
/etc/sysconfig/nfs.  This should take advantage of whatever number of
cores you have.

I suggest you watch the "retrans" count in the output of "nfsstat
-rc".  If this keeps increasing under load, then you could increase
the RPCNFSDCOUNT until you get a comfortable value.

Good luck,

 -Imed

-- 
Imed Chihi - عماد الشيحي
http://perso.hexabyte.tn/ichihi/




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