NFS against UDP

[Till Straumann]

Leon Pollak wrote:
> On Wednesday May 6 2009, Till Straumann wrote:
> > A few hints (NFS read operation only; write is very similar)
> >
> > - rtems NFS implementation is fully synchronous (no read-ahead,
> > i.e., request block X, wait until block X received). Probably your
> > raw UDP communication is similar but if it does implement
> > read-ahead / caching then expect significant slowdown when
> > using NFS.
> Thanks for the tip, I shall take this into account.
> But most of the time we do writing, not reading...
>
>
>
> > - For every block read, NFS requires XDR-decoding a protocol
> > header. This overhead is relatively small, especially if a large
> > block size is used (you want 8k / max. allowed by UDP). A large
> > block size also speeds up synchronous operation.
> Yes, but as i was able to understand from the last e-mails on the 
> list, the Jumbo packets are not supported "out-of-the-box" today. Or 
> am I wrong?
This is not a jumbo-packet issue. Using a large UDP packet
size is faster even if the (large) UDP reply to the NFS read
request is fragmented into smaller ethernet packets.
>
>
>
> > - The payload data is copied verbatim (w/o any byte-swapping
> > to the user's buffer). If the 'xdr_mbuf' stream is used then
> > the cost is similar to using normal UDP (copying from mbufs
> > into user buffer) -- otherwise data are copied twice (from
> > mbufs to NFS memory buffer, then again from there to user
> > buffer.
> > The behavior is compile-time configurable (nfsclient/src/rpcio.c)
> > -- by default a second copy operation is avoided.
> Great. Where can I read about all this?
rpcio.c, xdr_mbuf.c
>
>
>
> > -> If you use a large block size, read relatively large files
> > (>> NFS protocol header) and your current implementation
> > does not implement read-ahead/caching then I'd be surprised
> > if NFS is a lot slower. Nevertheless, you want to run a few
> > tests...
> Can you say something about "writes"? I suppose the same, yes?
Pretty much, yes.
>
>
> The last question - I need to be the NFS server (not client). Can you 
> recommend something for this?
Not really, sorry.

WKR
-- Till
>
>
> Till, thank you very much for your time.
> -- 
> Leon
>
>
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