USENIX 2003 Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX Track — Abstract
| Pp. 101-114 of the Proceedings |
NFS Tricks and Benchmarking Traps
Daniel Ellard and Margo Seltzer Harvard University
Abstract
We describe two modifications to the FreeBSD 4.6 NFS server to increase read throughput by improving the read-ahead heuristic to deal with reordered requests and stride access patterns. We show that for some stride access patterns, our new heuristics improve end-to-end NFS throughput by nearly a factor of two. We also show that benchmarking and experimenting with changes to an NFS server can be a subtle and challenging task, and that it is often difficult to distinguish the impact of a new algorithm or heuristic from the quirks of the underlying software and hardware with which they interact. We discuss these quirks and their potential effects.
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