🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello Mike,

> Some colleagues and I were discussing a subnet design the other day, and
> someone said that, for performance reasons, one shouldn't put a router
> between two hosts that have a "lot" of NFS traffic between them.
> 
> The reason given was that the router would have to decode every UDP packet
> in order to route it correctly, thus introducing unacceptable delays during
> heavy file transfer periods.
> 
> It is my impression that a decently powered router (like maybe an MGS) would
> be able to handle bursty, UDP-intensive applications like NFS with no problem.
> 

It is OK to NFS across networks that are ether-to-ether via a cisco
but do avoid it if you want to do it across a WAn that does not
consist of a full T1. If you see a lot of retarnsmissions, you should
use rsize and wsize parameters of mount to select smaller
transmissions. The 8K UDP packets sent by NFS are always fragmented to
begin with. Since most routers today match the ethernet mtu on serial
lines  and therefore additional fragmentation is unlikely to occur.
A protocol like RFS (I think it is developed by AT&T), based on TCP
and actually runs over streams which means, you can run it over UDP,
TCP, CLNS etc is maybe what is needed for such applications !? 




> Can anyone give me some insight on this?
> 
> Please email responses, and thanks in advance.
> 

> Mike Cantu
> mike@nit.PacTel.COM


Regards


Pasha Quadri
Customer Engg.