Thanks to all who responded me.
Question: Is NFS between Digital UNIX and Alpha Linux poor ?
Summary of Answers:
Mark Ray solved the NFS problem using UDP instead of TCP.
Others confirmed the poor NFS between Digital UNIX and Intel Linux, and
Matt anticipates the same things will happen in case of Alpha Linux .
Key words may be NFS3 and asynchronous write.
Marko and Joel recommended newer Linux kernel such as 2.2.
Joel also recommended NetBSD instead of Linux.
Answers:
1. NFS performance between Digital UNIX and Linux/Intel was about 1/4 of
Linux-Linux NFS performance. In newer Linux kernels (2.1.x and 2.2.0-pre)
NFS was being fixed. I didn't check. -- Marko Milivojevic
2. I had problems with Digital Unix as NFS server and Intel Linux boxes
as NFS clients. Performance was incrediably slow. With some tuning on
the Linux site I got a better performance but in general it is still
slow. -- Ansgar Schlueter
3. NFS file-system sharing between Digital UNIX and Alpha-Linux boxes.
Just from about a year's worth of experience, I can see
no performance faults at all; about the only thing I do is to make sure that
my Digital UNIX boxes serve up the NFS filesystems under UDP connections,
rather than TCP. This "seems" to make mounting faster -- probabaly I'm seeing
things -- and it definitely helps to prevent the "filesystem busy" messages I
get when dismounting same. -- Mark Ray
4. Linux's NFS wasn't too good in the 2.0 kernel, but it is much improved with the
new 2.2 kernel.
If NFS performance is important to you and Linux's NFS performance isn't
adequate, you might consider running NetBSD on you Alphas. NFS performance
between NetBSD and DU should be really good as both are derived from the
original Sun code. -- Joel Gallun
5. Performance between Intel/Linux and Alpha/OSF1 is poor. I hear this is
because Linux doesn't support NFS3. It also may be related to DUNIX not
supporting asynchronous writes. I don't know the details.
I suspect that Alpha/Linux and Alpha/OSF1 have the same problems. -- Matt Harrington
--
Kiyoshi Yoda yoda_at_ele.crl.melco.co.jp
Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Advanced Technology R&D Center
8-1-1 Tsukaguchi Hommachi, Amagasaki 661-8661 Japan
Phone: +81-6-6497-7124 Fax: +81-6-6497-7288
Received on Thu Jan 21 1999 - 01:15:39 NZDT