NFS problems

Hi, everyone,

I'm having a problem getting NFS to work right. It's working but seems
to take an extremely long time on large files.

Almost all of the important files we have reside on Linux or Fedora
systems. Previously, we also had an HP system in the mix (I don't
remember which HP-UX version, something old like 7.0 maybe). It did
all its work using the files on the Linux/Fedora systems via NFS, and
it worked fine. (I won't say the performance was optimal, but it was
quite adequate.) That system died, and a couple weeks ago we bought a
used HP system with 11.0 installed. I'm now trying to get it running.
Basically, we plugged in the same Internet cable that had been plugged
into the old HP system.

I'm finding that if I copy a file from one of the Linux systems to the
HP system, a 91KB file is copied in the blink of an eye, but copying an
860KB file takes an extremely long time---something like five *minutes*
or more. (Copying from the HP to the Linux systems is about the same.)
Since this wasn't happening with the old HP system, I'm assuming
something on the new HP is misconfigured. But I don't know what. I've
been trying to work through Dave Olker's "nfs performance tuning for
hp-ux 11.0 and 11i systems" presentation, but I'd appreciate any help
anyone can provide.

I used nfsstat -c (on the HP side) before and after copying the big
file. Interesting results (the values in brackets are the "before"
values):

Client rpc:
Connectionless oriented:
calls 270 [159]
timeouts 49 [0]
retrans 49 [0]
timers 84 [16]

Client nfs:
calls 270 [159]
clgets 270 [159]
Version 2: (243 [132] calls)
getattr 60 [57]
lookup 7 [6]
read 119 [13]
statfs 57 [56]
[No difference in any Version 3 statistics]

Mount parameters: rw,bg,soft,intr

The old HP system also had timeo=50 specified, but my understanding is
that this is irrelevant for UDP anyway.

I'm guessing the "timeouts" is the important statistic here. Are there
too many timeouts, or is NFS waiting too long before retransmitting, or
both, or.... ?

I appreciate any help anyone can provide.

-- thanks, Adam

.

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