NFS is pretty old file sharing technology for UNIX based system and storage systems. However, it suffers from performance issues. NFSv4.1 address data access issues by adding a new feature called parallel NFS (pNFS) – a method of introducing Data Access Parallelism. The end result is ultra fast file sharing for clusters and high availability configurations.
The Network File System (NFS) is a stalwart component of most modern local area networks (LANs). But NFS is inadequate for the demanding input- and output-intensive applications commonly found in high-performance computing — or, at least it was. The newest revision of the NFS standard includes Parallel NFS (pNFS), a parallelized implementation of file sharing that multiplies transfer rates by orders of magnitude.
A few days ago I noticed that NFS performance between a web server node and NFS server went down by 50%. NFS was optimized and the only thing was updated Red Hat kernel v5.2. I also noticed same trend on CentOS 5.2 64 bit edition.
Recently, I noticed something strange about Apache 2.2.3 version running on CentOS Linux 5 64 bit version. We have centralized NFS server and all 3 web server load balanced using hardware front end (another box running LVS). All Apache server picks up file via NFS i.e DocumentRoot is set over NFS. The small file such [...]
NFS (Network File System) client allows you to access shared directory from Linux client. The computer sharing the directory is called the NFS server (it can be NAS server too) and the computers or devices connecting to that server are called clients. The clients need to use the mount command to access the shared directory.
