From: jp107@cus.cam.ac.uk (Jon Peatfield)
Subject: Re: Return of the Poor NFS performance
Organization: U of Cambridge, England
Distribution: comp
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 04:11:33 GMT

Hmm, well this evening having nothing better to do (well I could
reinstall perl, xdvi, xfig, gs ghostview, etc like I've been promising
for weeks, but this SGI problem really has me hooked ;-), I decided to
try playing with one of our SGIs.  I'm really new to SGI machines, so
I was still learning about them, playing with "inst" etc, and pushing
in random CDs and seeign what "inst" made of them.  Anyway I put the
4.0.5F maintenance CD in and typed list.  Off it popped and gave me a
list of stuff, including the 4.0.5E nfs maintenance changes, which it
told me were NOT installed.  Now this machine was factory installed
with 4.0.5F, so I kind of assumed that they had put the 4.0.4E patches
in but...

I went away and read the manual, and found that "versions" was the
command I needed to check what was installed (like pkginfo on
Solaris-2 I suppose), and behold only 4.0.1 NFS was installed.  Aha!
Anyway I then had a crash course in how to boot to the miniroot and
installed it from there, (since it refuses to install from inst
running normally.)  After I reboot and check what is going on (hey why
does "inst" in this case build a new kernel for me, but when I
installed the 4.0.1 on the other machine it didn't?), I measured the
performance as about 37Kbytes/sec which is what I measured on the
other SGI all along (doubled the speed.)  However, the other SGI is
only running the 4.0.1NFS code since I didn't have chance to get round
to installing the 4.0.5E patch, and the people on the SGI helpdesk
said it didn't matter since I saw the problem on a machine with and
without -- well I do now.

Does this jog anyone's memory about that level of performance?

I'll try installing the 4.0.5E patch on the IP12 tomorrow and see if
that performs any better.  37Kbytes/sec isn't TOO bad, I can live with
it for a while, but I wouldn't want my sister to marry it.  (As her
husband probably wouldn't aprove.)

I'd also like to appologise for being rude in reply to the reply from
the person who suggested that it was a hard/soft mount problem.  I'd
just spent several hours watching the network and it was very late at
night and I was tired and cross.  I'm less cross now though it is
almost as late.  I'll phone SGI's support desk in the morning (well
afternoon probably), and see if they have come up with anything.

(At lest they are helpful, I've got a problem with one of our other
machines and the hardware maintenance people have been sending stuff
to the wrong address, and today they sent us a keyboard which
generates junk characters as you type as a swap for one with a broken
spacebar.  I'm not sure which keyboard I'll keep 'til they get us a
working one... but I'm not cruel enough to name them.)

-- Jon Peatfield  (Unix network admin)

--
Jon Peatfield, Computer Officer, the DAMTP, University of Cambridge
Telephone: (+44 223) 3-37852     Mail: J.S.Peatfield@amtp.cam.ac.uk

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