Hello all, Sorry if it seems like this is a repeat question, but I've gone through my Gentoo list for the past 2 years and none of the answers provided for previous threads on this seem to work for me. Here's the situation:
Gentoo box: AMD Athlon X2 3800+ Intel PCIe Gigabit Network adapter 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82572EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) (rev 06) Supermicro 8-port PCI-X SATA card (in a PCI slot) 03:06.0 SCSI storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 09) Western Digital 1TB Black Edition hard drive (writing to an XFS partition) 2.6.27-amd64 (Yes, it's old, it's on my list to upgrade) Client: MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26Ghz Intel integrated Gigabit Network adapter Seagate 160GB SATA hard drive (5400RPM) Mac OS X 10.6.1 /etc/exports: /mnt/daigo 192.168.0.31(rw,insecure) hdparm -tT /dev/sdf /dev/sdf: Timing cached reads: 1230 MB in 2.00 seconds = 614.64 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 316 MB in 3.01 seconds = 104.95 MB/sec Over NFS I'm getting 3.7MB/s, with occasional bursts of 25MB/s for 1-5 seconds, then returning to 3.7MB/s. During this entire process, the system load is hovering around 5.5. The same copy, using samba to share that partition, I get 45MB/s sustained. System load is around 1.0. Even though the SATA controller is over the PCI bus, which does limit its performance somewhat (no RAID arrays are running on it) as you can see from the attached hdparm output, the disk is capable of speeds that should be around what gigabit ethernet can provide. I know this is a Gentoo list, and not generally the place to complain about poor NFS performance in Mac OS X, we all know Gentoo is superior in just about every way anyway. However, I simply cannot believe that the difference in transfer speeds is due to strictly to Mac OS X's NFS capabilities. Does anyone have any suggestions for reducing the system load caused by NFS? Can you suggest any performance increasing tips for my NFS configuration? Thanks, Hal
