> >> Maybe it is updating the access time on each read or something that > >> causes the activity. > > > > It is either re-reading the files or checking mod times to determin > > if the local cached copy is valid. Either way, lots of traffic. > > And this was hundreds of ops/second? I need to ppoint out that the retieval script was running on a RHEL3 machine. The filer NFS load was registered from a CentOS5 machine, and the only connection between the two were one or more vnc sessions. I cannot explain what happened, other than the observation that the excessive NFS access from the CentOS machine stopped when we disabled that screensaver on RHEL3.