[CentOS] NFS /home freezes.

Wed May 16 18:59:56 UTC 2007
Jean Figarella <jfigarella at vecna.com>

Jean Figarella wrote:
> 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.
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I think I found the issue here. Its the sync option in the server. I am 
running it with async instead and so far so go. But still any other 
suggestions are welcome.


Jean