Initial NFS access very slow

[Aaron Konstam]

On Sun, 2006-05-07 at 17:06 -0400, David-Paul Niner wrote:
> On Sun May 7 2006 4:55 pm, Frank Cox wrote:
> > On Sun, 07 May 2006 15:46:01 -0500
> >
> > Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > > What are command are you issuing that you are calling the initial
> > > command?
> >
> > Anything at all that accesses the NFS share.
> >
> > Examples:
> > ls /mnt/webserver/home/www
> > cp /mnt/webserver/home/www/index.html /home/backupwww
> >
> > Whatever.  The first access to the NFS share takes a very long time.  After
> > that, things respond as they should.  Then, after not accessing the share
> > for several minutes or hours, it's back to waiting for the initial access
> > to go through again.
> >
> 
> I've seen that sort of behavior in the past on a RHEL 4ES box.  Nothing too 
> beefy, but adequate enough--1gig uni-proc 2.4gig machine, IDE all the way, 
> with only a single client connected.
> 
> The delay from the initial `ls` and the file listing can be as long as 
> ten-seconds.  It seems to only happen (for me) when mounting a subdirectory 
> of an exported file system.  In otherwords, I'll export /a/sample/directory 
> from the server, but I'll be mounting /a/sample/directory/further/below on 
> the client.
> 
> This is fairly common scenario, of course, when automounting /home directories 
> using autofs.  
> 
> There may be some options one could change in the fstab file to fix this; It 
> happens so infrequently that I haven't bothered to research it any further.
> 
> DP
Well two things come to mind. If you rely on automounting the delay
might be expected on the first access. I think mounting a different
directory then you are exporting should work but I owuld not be
surprised at delays in access but I would not think that hte first time
would be any different the second time.

Are you automounting the exported directory? We have not tried nfs
mounts to our clients in FC5 yet but we had no trouble in any of the
other distributions except on infrequent occasions when the server had
unexpectedly gone down and then came up. That often required a reboot
for the nfs to re-connect.
-- 
Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net>