My old nfs server was an old dual Xeon machine running debian. Everything worked fine. Then I switched over to a new Penguin Computer Altus 2600 (if Im not mistaken) with two Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2210 and 4GB of ram. CentOS4.4 is running on it.
Now here is the thing, this nfs server is exporting "/home" and all workstations mount the /home dir via fstab. Ever since I switched to this new server running CentOS4.4 everyone on the network gets 5-20 second freezes sporadically trough the day. In other words if I am browsing the net using Firefox, because all the user's options and cache are stored on ~/.firefox, it freezes for the 5 to 20 seconds at a time.
After running some test, this happens when big chunks of file are being copied via nfs to the server. So as an example if user1 has a 700Mb iso image in /tmp and he decides to copy this to his home dir (for whatever reasons, this is not important), every user in the network will experience 5 to 20 seconds freezes while the file is being copied. Now if the same file is being scp-ed to the same user's home dir on the server, the freezes do not happen.
Now I have tried many different nfs server options and other nfs client options. I also set up a test nfs server with centos4 and 5 where I am the only user, and while copying big chunks of date, nfs freezes (hangs) too.
Here is my /etc/exports: /home *domain.com(rw,root_squash,sync,no_subtree_check,no_wdelay)
Here is how client workstations mount the export in the fstab fshome:/home /home/ nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,intr 0 0
Am I mis-configuring the nfs server of clients? Is there anything I am not doing right? If anybody has any suggestions, I would appreciate it very much.
Thanks, Jean Figarella.