*BSD News Article 34430


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From: bill@bhhome.ci.net (Bill Heiser)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Whats wrong with Linux networking ???
Date: 9 Aug 1994 10:59:44 GMT
Organization: The Internet Access Company
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Message-ID: <327nj0$sfq@sundog.tiac.net>
References: <Cu107E.Mz3@curia.ucc.ie> <31trcr$9n@euterpe.owl.de> <3256t1$rbn@ra.nrl.navy.mil>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bhhome.ci.net

cmetz@sundance.itd.nrl.navy.mil (Craig Metz) writes:

>>- NFS was *slooow*
>	No arguing this one. Linux's NFS is still in need of serious work.

The *speed* of LINUX NFS isn't the real problem.  The reason it's so slow
is that by default it uses a 1K blocksize.  You can increase the rsize and
wsize to 8K, like Sun, and the performance improves dramatically.

However the *REAL* problem with LINUX NFS is that it does not currently do
any file locking.  So you can run into some real problems if, for example,
you NFS-mount your mail spool directory from another machine and both machines
try to write to it.

Someone in c.o.l.d. mentioned that he wanted to work on this but couldn't 
find the specs for the NFS file-locking mechanism.  I hope he (or someone)
does soon!  I don't want to have to dump LINUX, with it's nice complete
"fully operational system out of the box" and go with the piecemeal *bsd 
products (not that there's anything wrong with *bsd, it's just less
convenient to install since it requires days or weeks of hunting for
utilities, compiling them, installing them, etc, whereas with LINUX
distributions, all the useful stuff is already there).


-- 
Bill Heiser:    bill@bhhome.ci.net,  heiser@world.std.com