On Wed, Apr 12, 2000 at 08:13:44PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
>   Given that CPU speeds have increased an order of magnitude faster than
> disk speeds, is there any advantage to having multiple CPUs on NFS servers?
>   It used to be that NFS servers were always CPU bound, but that was in the
> days of 20Mhz '030s and 40Mhz Sparc CPUs. Are there any papers that describe
> what happens now?
>   The origin of this query: I'd rather switch a Linux NFS server for a
> NetBSD one (vs a FreeBSD one). Linux botches NFS, and frankly, simple things
> like "reboot" fail to work if you have exported partitions. I prefer NetBSD
> for administrative reasons (we already have some NetBSD boxes). FreeBSD
> offers big-lock SMP, which I suspect won't help anyway. Another alternative
> is Solaris/x86 if multiple CPUs are really useful in this context.
> 
>   Advice?

What CPU and network interfaces do you have ? I believe that on the average
hardware the bottleneck will still be CPU with a buch of stripped SCSI disks
and a gigabit interface :)

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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