Re: Q: Performance of gnome when mounted via NFS

[Paul Drain <pd cipherfunk org>]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 02:28 +0200, guenther wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 14:20 -0400, Keith Hanlan wrote:
> > If I were to build garnome and install it on an NFS mount, would the
> > resulting performance suffer greatly? In this environment, the NFS
> > servers and network are top-end industrial - but they're not going to be
> > as good as local filesystem access.
> 
> Due to a lack of resources I never tried this... ;)

I have though :)

> Seriously, of course this all depends on your network and server
> infrastructure. With all locally running apps and a network storage for
> the $prefix only, I wouldn't expect a huge performance drop, given a
> fast network and servers. However, please note that I do not have a lot
> of experience with this.

Depends.

If your NFS mount is /home on the client box, and you're not using any
sort of extended attributes -- bits of GARNOME work quite well over NFS.

Beagle, for example -- sucks performance wise when started from NFS for
some reason, I don't use it on a regular basis though, so i've never had
the inkling to figure out why this is.

Evolution, on the other hand -- works quite well with a SMTP-TLS and
POP3/Pop-Before-SMTP setup as a client from NFS on my primary
workstation (2.0.x from Ubuntu Warty Warthog) and my other desktop
(2.6.1 from GARNOME)

Evolution, on NFS with IMAP -- has many of the same caveats as Evolution
with IMAP without NFS -- it's fragile, but operational :)

> > We're using RHEL4 which is distributing Evolution 2.0.2 and I want to
> > provide an updated version (2.6.1) without having to update the 100+
> > desktops themselves.

Personally, i'd recommend backing up the .evolution directory before
running 2.6.x for the first time -- just to be sure nothing from the
big-bump-in-major-versions(tm) throws you a curve.

Hope that helps,

Paul