Re: Q: Performance of gnome when mounted via NFS

[guenther <guenther rudersport de>]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 16:00 +1000, Paul Drain wrote:
> 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 :)

Funk! Good to see you around. :)

> > 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.

Ah, I just realized I forgot to stress a point. I mentioned above the
GARNOME $prefix to be on NFS only -- implicitly meaning $HOME to *not*
be on NFS.

The latter most likely would decrease performance notably, AFAIK. But
this is not related to GARNOME at all, simply a fact of some
(potentially) major disk activity in the users $HOME.


> 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.

In your scenario with an NFS $HOME, it sure does. ;)

> 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 :)

Honestly, don't agree here. I have tested Evo with at least 10 different
IMAP connections, concurring. No issue whatsoever. Also, I frequently
mess around with my Evo for testing purpose, and I don't see it being
fragile. Well, my [1] opinion anyway. ;)

> > > 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.

Of course -- though Evo should migrate it's old data just fine.

However, you definitely want to back up ~/.evolution/ (well, make that
~/evolution/ if you are currently using a *very* old Evo version) and
~/.gconf/apps/evolution/ .

...guenther


[1] Evolution bugging master and interactive FAQ answering bot

-- 
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main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}