Tune NFS Performance

Q. What values can be tuned to improve NFS performance? How do I improve my NFS sever and client performance under Linux operating systems?

A. mount command allows you to fine tune NFS mounting to improve NFS performance.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to NFS performance tuning. Different servers handling different workloads need to be tuned differently. Please test and monitor both your server and client systems as you test different tuning options.

Recommended NFS tuning Options

  • noacl: Disables Access Control List (ACL) processing.
  • nocto: Suppress the retrieval of new attributes when creating a file.
  • rsize: The number of bytes NFS uses when reading files from an NFS server. The rsize is negotiated between the server and client to determine the largest block size that both can support. The value specified by this option is the maximum size that could be used; however, the actual size used may be smaller. Note: Setting this size to a value less than the largest supported block size will adversely affect performance.
  • wsize: The number of bytes NFS uses when writing files to an NFS server. The wsize is negotiated between the server and client to determine the largest block size that both can support. The value specified by this option is the maximum size that could be used; however, the actual size used may be smaller. Note: Setting this size to a value less than the largest supported block size will adversely affect performance.
  • noatime: Setting this value disables the NFS server from updating the inodes access time. As most applications do not necessarily need this value, you can safely disable this updating.
  • nodiratime: Setting this value disables the NFS server from updating the directory access time. This is the directory equivalent setting of noatime.
  • noac: Disable all forms of attribute caching entirely. This extracts a significant performance penalty but it allows two different NFS clients to get reasonable results when both clients are actively writing to a common export on the server.

Here is sample mount command with above options:
<code> mount.nfs -o noacl,nocto, rsize=32768,wsize=32768 nfsserver:/sales /salesdata/ </code>

Read nfs and mount command man pages for more information.