[comp.sys.sun] Slow NFS writes

tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) (07/11/90)

NFS writes are much slower than NFS reads. Is there any way of speeding up
NFS writes under SunOS?  I believe the poor NFS write performance is due
to synchronous acknowledgements of the writes from the server. I have
heard that in some versions of NFS, one can get the server to acknowledge
immediately rather than after the actual disk write (with an obvious but
probably small risk of disk file corruption when the server goes down). Is
this possible under SunOS?

					Thanks, Thomas.  
					tmb@ai.mit.edu

"Mark_Weiser.PARC"@xerox.com (07/20/90)

|"I have heard that in some versions of NFS, one can get the server to
|acknowledge immediately rather than after the actual disk write (with an
|obvious but probably small risk of disk file corruption when the server
|goes down). Is this possible under SunOS?"

This is a server property, of course.  The new MIPS file servers running
their OS 4.5 allow you to set this behavior on a file-system by
file-system basis.  We have one uses exclusively as a file server, use it
almost always in this fast write mode, and are pretty happy.