Optimal number of nfsd?

[Tim Wait]

Jim Meyer wrote:

>># Number of servers to be started by default
>>RPCNFSDCOUNT=36
> 
> 
> Here's an excellent question: how does one calculate the optimal number
> of nfsd processes to have lying about?


Well, in my case it was quite an unscientific procedure ;)

I have about 50 machines mounting /home and /usr/local off the server
and generally only have about 36 nodes crunching at any given time -
so I just allocated one nfsd/crunching node. Of course this is assuming
the hits to the mounts are only coming from single threaded userland procs;
so I suppose you'd want more to handle system I/O on a diskless setup
or smp boxes, for example.

Bottom line is this is a multivariate problem that you'd have to
test for your given setup. I haven't looked into the guts of
NFS but nfsd appears to be pretty low overhead so I'm not sure
that it's really worth the effort.

Tim