NFS Performance Tuning for HP-UX 11.0 and 11i Systems

nfs performance tuning for hp-ux 11.0 and 11i systems page 4

Notes:

Page 4July 22, 2002

environmental

considerations

• Network

• Local Filesystems

• OS Patching

• Hostname Resolution

NFS is essentially a network-based application that runs on top of an operating

system, such as HP-UX. Like most applications, NFS competes for resources (such

as disk, network, memory, and kernel tables) with the other processes on the

system. When investigating any NFS performance issue, it is important to perform

a “sanity check” of the overall environment in which the clients and servers reside.

NFS functionality is heavily dependent upon the behavior of many subsystems (i.e.

disk, network, memory) and is therefore susceptible to performance problems in

them. In other words, if the performance of the network is slow, NFS throughput

will most likely suffer. Similarly, if local filesystem read and write throughput on the

NFS server is slow, NFS read and write throughput to this server will likely be slow.

NFS continues to evolve over time. Consequently, it is a good idea to keep the

HP-UX operating system on your NFS systems up-to-date with available patches.

Most NFS components rely in some way on hostname resolution (i.e. rpc.mountd,

rpc.lockd, rpc.statd, automount, etc.). It is therefore important to verify that your

hostname resolution servers respond quickly and provide accurate information.