On Wed, 16 Sep 1998, David Steere wrote:
> For writes, NFS has a known liability because it has to do writes
> synchronously. If you were to use one of the hardware accelerators
> (basically staging to a ramdisk), NFS's write performance speeds up a lot.

A *battery-backed* ramdisk, one would hope.  (Kids, be careful about
trying this at home! :) )

My experience with NetApp FAServers is that, even with a big
battery-backed ramdisk, NFS writes are pretty slow compared to local
disks.  But that was a couple years ago, and we didn't do quantitative
measurements or find out why.  It's just that compiles were much faster
when on our local workstation disks.   Could have been network
congestion, NFS-server contention, etc.

Kragen

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The sages do not believe that making no mistakes is a blessing. They believe, 
rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability to correct his 
mistakes and continually make a new man of himself.  -- Wang Yang-Ming