Re: NFS-swap and NFS slowness questions

[Crispin Murphy <crispin@myra.com>]

"Prokopski Grzegorz El.I" wrote:

>Are there any complications with using NFS-swap? Somebody tryed to use it?

I would like to use NFS-swap, but I haven't seen a recent patch.

> (My diskless have only 16MB ram and I want to use
> it for sth
Ouch...
 
> better than fvwm2 - maybe GNOME? or KDE? - which
> would be better in your
> opinion?
Both of these DEs are memory pigs - we use KDE but we have 64 Mb ram on
the
desktops...
 
>  need also StarOffice and Netscape - where can
> i get older version of
> netscape? (for linux of course)
Older distros will have older versions of netscape - most linux types have
some older
CDs that should have NS 3.x on them.
> Tere's also problem of speed. I know that NFS was
> designed a long time ago
> and is slower than for ex. samba. I tryied to make it faster by using
> rsize=8128 and wsize=8128 (maybe the number is "a little" wrong - i
> can't
rsize = 8192, wsize = 8192
 
> remember) But i can't see it got better (i get 100KB/sec).
Are you using el-cheapo NE-2000 compatible NICs?  A high quality,
well supported
NIC will make a difference.
 
> Somewhere i've read about sth. faster than NFS (it's
> name was XFS or sth
> like that) but i can't find it anymore.
> Has anyoune used it? Or has any sugestions?
> It's really too slow for normal use now.
Be fair - it sounds like you're trying to get modern performance out of
obselete gear,
if you've only got 16 MB of ram.  I believe that you are probably
thinking of CODA,
the next generation network filesystem.  XFS is a journalling
filesystem which SGI has
just released to the open source community - not for networks. 
Anyways, CODA isn't
really implemented yet, and we certainly don't have a CODA root kernel
option.

Technically, you could try putting /usr on a samba server and mounting /usr with smbfs,
but I doubt that that's going to work too well.

Realise that nobody is working too hard on the NFS implementation for linux.  Its pretty
slow, and people seem much more interested in CODA than doing NFS v3 (we only have
NFS v2).

And don't try to compile anything on your diskless workstations.  Its _painful_.

Crispin
 

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