From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2008-03-06T22:38:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Better performance than native unix commands?

On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 10:10:54AM +0900, Ma Sa wrote:
> I have a directory with a large amount of files that is mounted over
> nfs. The network is gigabit and so are the nic's. The servers are very
> high end so the hardware / network performance is not the bottleneck.
> However, sometimes it can take a very long time to list out the files
> contained within a directory.

We've found on our linux-based nfs server that increasing the number of
threads in the nfs process improves performance in some cases.

We've also found that avoiding nfs altogether whenever possible is
preferable.  Switching to wget with a lightweight http server to
transfer large files instead of reading them directly off the nfs mount
was a big improvement.  You could try starting a drb server on the nfs
server to feed out file listings and see if that improves performance.

Paul