[CentOS] nfs (or tcp or scheduler) changes between centos 5 and 6?

Wed Apr 29 15:39:17 UTC 2015
James Pearson <james-p at moving-picture.com>

m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Matt Garman wrote:
> 
>>We have a "compute cluster" of about 100 machines that do a read-only
>>NFS mount to a big NAS filer (a NetApp FAS6280).  The jobs running on
>>these boxes are analysis/simulation jobs that constantly read data off
>>the NAS.
> 
> <snip>
> *IF* I understand you, I've got one question: what parms are you using to
> mount the storage? We had *real* performance problems when we went from 5
> to 6 - as in, unzipping a 26M file to 107M, while writing to an
> NFS-mounted drive, went from 30 sec or so to a *timed* 7 min. The final
> answer was that once we mounted the NFS filesystem with nobarrier in fstab
> instead of default, the time dropped to 35 or 40 sec again.
> 
> barrier is in 6, and tries to make writes atomic transactions; its intent
> is to protect in case of things like power failure. Esp. if you're on
> UPSes, nobarrier is the way to go.

The server in this case isn't a Linux box with an ext4 file system - so 
that won't help ...

James Pearson