In message <200004130013.UAA06681@pzero.sandelman.ottawa.on.
ca>Michael Richardson writes:
[nfs server]

>  Advice?

what kind of network?

These days, even cheap disks sustain 15 Mbytes/sec for large-ish
reads. (I think high-end SCSI disks are about twice that).

Even a 166MHz Pentium could handle the copying and checksumming to
saturate a 100Mbit NIC. So unless your NFS servers have multiple NICs,
or gigabit Ethernet, your bottleneck is likely to be 100mbit media,
not CPU or disk.

(I concur on avoiding Linux, btw.  Linux 2.2.x finally got in-kernel
NFS.  It works, mostly, with Linux clients, but (as of 2.2.12) for
Solaris or BSD clients, it's busted. And once you fall back to
userspace NFS, the performance is as horrible as it ever was.)