High-Speed NFS Diploma Thesis

Due to the constantly increasing performance of standard PCs, we can observe a growing interest in Clusters of PCs (CoPs). The distributed file system, which pro-vides access to most of the data is an important part of a CoPs. Often the Network File System (NFS) is used for this purpose. With the NFS implementation in Linux modern PCs are far from being able to fully take advantage of modern high-speed networks like Gigabit Ethernet. The main reason is that the improvement in local area network bandwidth achieved in recent years is far greater than the increase in memory bandwidth of computers. In this thesis we analyze the performance of NFS for CoPs running the Linux oper-ating system to show improvement possibilities. Because the implementation of the underlying network software strongly affects the speed of data transfers via NFS, critical functions within the Linux kernel were instrumented. This allows the proc-essing time for various operations performed during data transfers to be measured. The gathered information is used to locate weak points and bottlenecks. Additionall