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Xenix - Unix I.P.B. 3102 26th June 1991 (PW)
Department Category Implementation
Unix Software Advisory
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SCO NFS Configuration

Some concern over the performance of systems running SCO NFS has been voiced. To enhance the performance a number of modifications are available to the installer however, the first and most important issue is to ensure that the system has adequate memory for the task. To examine the amount of memory being used use either

sar -r | more

which indicates freemem and freeswap, or use

sar -w | more

which reports swapins and swapouts. Either method should indicate no swapping, action is strongly recommended if swapping is identified.

To increase disk performance with SCO NFS the variable MAXBUF in the kernel should be increased from the default of 600 to at least 1000. This will also improve significantly the performance of PC-NFS based systems when making use of the UNIX and NFS host.

If you believe your system to be experiencing problems with Ethernet packet retransmission then the mounting of NFS filesystems can be modified to vary the transfer packet size. For example

/etc/mount -f NFS,rsize=1024,wsize=1024,intr server1:/ /mnt

will set the transfer size to 1KB, the default is 8KB which is not always the optimum value.

Finally on a network which is based around NFS it may well be necessary to increase the number of NFS server daemons. The number of daemons is setup in the startup script /etc/nfs with the line

nfsd 4

Increasing the value from 4 will allow handling more filesystem requests and is advisable on a server expecting high NFS loads.

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Computing for a Connected World