[K12OSN] untarring over NFS

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 16:29, Jack wrote:
> I'm using an NFS server for all the home directories.  I've noticied
> that if I have say a 20 meg tar file and I try to untar it, it takes
> about a minute.  However when ssh directly into the NFS server and
> perform the same function it works almost instantly.  I thought NFS was
> chatty but geez! 

You probably have NFS working in synchronous mode.  That means that
every update when you create and write to files will wait for
the physical write to disk to complete.  The theory is that you
could reboot the server in the middle of that tar operation and
the client would just wait and pick up where it left off without
losing anything.  When you do it directly on the server, disk
writes are buffered and the program doesn't wait unless the buffer
is full.  You shouldn't see anywhere near the same delay when
you are only reading files.  If write speed is more important than
safety (how often does your server reboot anyway?) you can use
the async mount option.

---
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com