5. Optimizing NFS Performance
Careful analysis of your environment, both from the client and from the server point of view, is the first step necessary for optimal NFS performance. The first sections will address issues that are generally important to the client. Later (Section 5.3 and beyond), server side issues will be discussed. In both cases, these issues will not be limited exclusively to one side or the other, but it is useful to separate the two in order to get a clearer picture of cause and effect.
Aside from the general network configuration - appropriate network capacity, faster NICs, full duplex settings in order to reduce collisions, agreement in network speed among the switches and hubs, etc. - one of the most important client optimization settings are the NFS data transfer buffer sizes, specified by the mount command options rsize and wsize .
The mount command options rsize and wsize specify the size of the chunks of data that the client and server pass back and forth to each other. If no rsize and wsize options are specified, the default varies by which version of NFS we are using. The most common default is 4K (4096 bytes), although for TCP-based mounts in 2.2 kernels, and for all mounts beginning with 2.4 kernels, the server specifies the default block size.
The theoretical limit for the NFS V2 protocol is 8K. For the V3 protocol, the limit is specific to the server. On the Linux server, the maximum block size is defined by the value of the kernel constant NFSSVC_MAXBLKSIZE , found in the Linux kernel source file ./include/linux/nfsd/const.h . The current maximum block size for the kernel, as of 2.4.17, is 8K (8192 bytes), but the patch set implementing NFS over TCP/IP transport in the 2.4 series, as of this writing, uses a value of 32K (defined in the patch as 32*1024) for the maximum block size.
All 2.4 clients currently support up to 32K block transfer sizes, allowing the standard 32K block transfers across NFS mounts from other servers, such as Solaris, without client modification.
The defaults may be too big or too small, depending on the specific combination of hardware and kernels. On the one hand, some combinations of Linux kernels and network cards (largely on older machines) cannot handle blocks that large. On the other hand, if they can handle larger blocks, a bigger size might be faster.
You will want to experiment and find an rsize and wsize that works and is as fast as possible. You can test the speed of your options with some simple commands, if your network environment is not heavily used. Note that your results may vary widely unless you resort to using more complex benchmarks, such as Bonnie, Bonnie++, or IOzone.
The first of these commands transfers 16384 blocks of 16k each from the special file /dev/zero (which if you read it just spits out zeros really fast) to the mounted partition. We will time it to see how long it takes. So, from the client machine, type:
# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/home/testfile bs=16k count=16384
This creates a 256Mb file of zeroed bytes. In general, you should create a file that's at least twice as large as the system RAM on the server, but make sure you have enough disk space! Then read back the file into the great black hole on the client machine (/dev/null ) by typing the following:
# time dd if=/mnt/home/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16k
Repeat this a few times and average how long it takes. Be sure to unmount and remount the filesystem each time (both on the client and, if you are zealous, locally on the server as well), which should clear out any caches.
Then unmount, and mount again with a larger and smaller block size. They should be multiples of 1024, and not larger than the maximum block size allowed by your system. Note that NFS Version 2 is limited to a maximum of 8K, regardless of the maximum block size defined by NFSSVC_MAXBLKSIZE; Version 3 will support up to 64K, if permitted. The block size should be a power of two since most of the parameters that would constrain it (such as file system block sizes and network packet size) are also powers of two. However, some users have reported better successes with block sizes that are not powers of two but are still multiples of the file system block size and the network packet size.
Directly after mounting with a larger size, cd into the mounted file system and do things like ls , explore the filesystem a bit to make sure everything is as it should. If the rsize/wsize is too large the symptoms are very odd and not 100% obvious. A typical symptom is incomplete file lists when doing ls, and no error messages, or reading files failing mysteriously with no error messages. After establishing that the given rsize/wsize works you can do the speed tests again. Different server platforms are likely to have different optimal sizes.
Remember to edit /etc/fstab to reflect the rsize/wsize you found to be the most desirable.
If your results seem inconsistent, or doubtful, you may need to analyze your network more extensively while varying the rsize and wsize values. In that case, here are several pointers to benchmarks that may prove useful:
- Bonnie: http://www.textuality.com/bonnie/
- Bonnie++: http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++
- IOZone File System Benchmark:http://www.iozone.org
- The official NFS benchmark, SPECsfs97: http://www.spec.org/osg/sfs97/
The easiest benchmark with the widest coverage, including an extensive spread of file sizes, and of IO types - reads, writes, rereads, and rewrites, random access, etc. - seems to be IOzone. A recommended invocation of IOzone (for which you must have root privileges) includes unmounting and remounting the directory under test, in order to clear out the caches between tests, and including the file close time in the measurements. Assuming you've already exported /tmp to everyone from the server foo, and that you've installed IOzone in the local directory, this should work:
# echo "foo:/tmp /mnt/foo nfs rw,hard,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0"
>> /etc/fstab
# mkdir /mnt/foo
# mount /mnt/foo
# ./iozone -a -R -c -U /mnt/foo -f /mnt/foo/testfile > logfile
The benchmark should take 2-3 hours at most, but of course you will need to run it for each value of rsize and wsize that is of interest. The web site gives full documentation of the parameters, but the specific options used above are:
- -a : Full automatic mode, which tests file sizes of 64K to 512M, using record sizes of 4K to 16M
- -R : Generate report in excel spreadsheet form (The "surface plot" option for graphs is best)
- -c : Include the file close time in the tests, which will pick up the NFS version 3 commit time
- -U : Use the given mount point to unmount and remount between tests; it clears out caches
- -f : When using unmount, you have to locate the test file in the mounted file system
While many Linux network card drivers are excellent, some are quite shoddy, including a few drivers for some fairly standard cards. It is worth experimenting with your network card directly to find out how it can best handle traffic.
Try pinging back and forth between the two machines with large packets using the -f and -s options with ping (see ping(8) for more details) and see if a lot of packets get dropped, or if they take a long time for a reply. If so, you may have a problem with the performance of your network card.
For a more extensive analysis of NFS behavior in particular, use the nfsstat command to look at nfs transactions, client and server statistics, network statistics, and so forth. The -o net option will show you the number of dropped packets in relation to the total number of transactions. In UDP transactions, the most important statistic is the number of retransmissions, due to dropped packets, socket buffer overflows, general server congestion, timeouts, etc. This will have a tremendously important effect on NFS performance, and should be carefully monitored. Note that nfsstat does not yet implement the -z option, which would zero out all counters, so you must look at the current nfsstat counter values prior to running the benchmarks.
To correct network problems, you may wish to reconfigure the packet size that your network card uses. Very often there is a constraint somewhere else in the network (such as a router) that causes a smaller maximum packet size between two machines than what the network cards on the machines are actually capable of. TCP should autodiscover the appropriate packet size for a network, but UDP will simply stay at a default value. So determining the appropriate packet size is especially important if you are using NFS over UDP.
You can test for the network packet size using the tracepath command: From the client machine, execute:
$ tracepath server
1: server (x.x.x.x) 0.274ms pmtu 1500
1: x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x) 0.494ms
2: x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x) 0.424ms
3: x.x.x.x (x.x.x.x) 1.042ms
4: server (x.x.x.x) 0.421ms reached
Resume: pmtu 1500 hops 4 back 4
$
and the path MTU should be reported at the bottom. You can then set the MTU on your network card equal to the path MTU, by using the MTU option to ifconfig , and see if fewer packets get dropped. See the ifconfig man pages for details on how to reset the MTU.
In addition, netstat -s will give the statistics collected for traffic across all supported protocols. You may also look at /proc/net/snmp for information about current network behavior; see the next section for more details.
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