[K12OSN] bootup slow -- nfs server not responding

[Les Mikesell]

Rob Owens wrote:
> I'm running K12LTSP 5.0EL 32-bit on a desktop-like machine with software
> RAID 1 using SATA drives.  Processor is a dual-core AMD 5000+, NIC is
> gigabit, and I just upgraded to 4GB RAM (from 2GB).  It's serving 11
> GNOME sessions and 5 rdesktop sessions.  The server also runs MySQL and
> Apache for some very lightly used web applications.
> 
> The reason I upgraded the RAM is because I've been getting slow boot
> times on the thin clients, with the message "nfs server not responding"
> showing up at least 10 times during the boot process.  The clients
> eventually boot successfully.  The upgrade didn't seem to help, but hey,
> it was cheap and easy to try.
> 
> iftop says I'm only using about 20Mb of bandwidth on the server's NIC.
> top shows the CPU usage is usually below 5%, and rarely hits 40%.  So I
> think my hardware is up to the task.  Are there any NFS tweaks I should
> be employing to eliminate the "not responding" errors, thereby speeding
> up my boot process?
> 
> By the way, I have very little other network activity so I don't think
> my wires or my switch are saturated.
> 

Are you up to date with the current 5.2 updates?  I think one of the 
fairly recent kernel updates had NFS performance fixes - I'm not sure if 
it will help with this issue, though.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com