NEXTSTEP

Title: Solaris 2.4 NFS clients slow with NEXTSTEP NFS servers

Entry Number: 
Last Updated: 17 April 1995
Document Revision: 

Keywords: NFS, Solaris

Question

When I have a Sun Solaris 2.4 system as an NFS client and a  NEXTSTEP 3.3 system as the NFS server, the  access starts out very slow.  What casues this and is there a way to speed up the access time?

Answer

This problem is caused by a change in the Solaris NFS code in the 2.4 release. The new version of NFS READDIR in the Solaris 2.4 release trys to request more than 1024 bytes of directory data (this gains faster reponse from the NFS servers that support the larger size). The NEXTSTEP NFS server (and other NFS servers which are based on older NFS source code) fail to repond to this request. Sun Solaris  will retransmit the READDIR requests and eventually will dynamically change the rsize and wsize values for the mount to smaller values. You may verify this on the Sun with nfsstat -m command. In about 2 to 5 minutes the rsize and wsize will be reduced and the READDIR requests to the Next start working!

To workaround this problem set the rsize and wsize for the mount entries on a Solaris 2.4 NFS client to 1024 for all mounts from NEXTSTEP NFS servers.