testing NFS thoroughly ?

ikshaar · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:01 pm Post subject: testing NFS thoroughly ?

Hi,

I have a new Gentoo server (2xOpteron dual core, 8Gb RAM, 8xHDD in 2 RAID arrays) who froze twice now. No error messages anywhere. Both time I was emerging something on the server and at same time running an emerge on a remote machine which shared the portage tree of the server - exported by NFS. This might not be related but I have to investigate it.

So far I was not able to reproduce the problem. I tested the CPU temperature (cpuburn) the memory (memtest). I am now looking for a way to test NFS ? short of copying file back and forth I don't know enough about NFS to do much. So I was wondering is there any benchmark for NFS that I could use to stress it ?
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"May God stands between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk" - Babylon 5

jamapii · l33t Joined: 16 Sep 2004 Posts: 637

I don't know of any benchmark or stress test but I suspect NFS (the server) to cause freezes too.

I've got a VIA Epia pc. As long as it had no hard disk, it ran Linux 2.4, was an NFS client only, and it rarely crashed.

With a hard disk, Linux 2.6, and /usr/portage exported, it freezes predictably when there are a lot of small-file write accesses over NFS. This happens when emerging a cvs package on a different computer. It almost never happens with big files, and never happens just on read access.

My other computers don't seem to have this problem (Linux 2.6 and VIA too), but they don't get lots of small-file write accesses to their NFS server.

your_WooDness · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Oct 2007 Posts: 77

Hi,

if you don't have socket F processors refer to the following .pdf from AMD. On page 169 there is the DRAM Config chapter which tells you which speeds are allowed at which configuration. Otherwise erros can occur that you also can't recreate. The system may run for a while without problems but then starts out of the blue making problems....
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/26094.PDF
Start on page 175 with the tables for your platform and the number of DIMMs used for altering the DRAM speed in the BIOS of your mainboard. I have seen a lot of strange problems that resulted out of this.

WooD

ikshaar · Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:43 pm Post subject:

Those are socket F processors. But thanks.

Using scp now to test network without NFS... and will see.
_________________
"May God stands between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk" - Babylon 5