Filepro and NFS or SAN

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008, Fairlight wrote:
>This public service announcement was brought to you by Richard D. Williams:
>> Has anyone used Filepro in a SAN or NFS environment?
>> 
>> It seems like it should work without a hitch, but I would like some input.
>
>It can work, if your version of NFS supports proper locking.
>
>However, I outlined the mathematical bandwidth requirements for a tiny test
>case scenario in a thread earlier in the year.  I suggest checking the
>archives at http://lists.celestial.com/pipermail/filepro-list for the
>relevant thread, as I'm certainly not going to redo the math at this point.
>
>Let's just say it's not advisable.

I have found that forcing NFS mounts to use tcp instead of udp
seems to be faster and more reliable.

As for locking, the only thing we do with NFS that puts very
heavy loads on the systems is at ISPs where we deliver e-mail to
10s of thousands of NFS mounted $HOME/Maildir stores with a
cluster of servers doing spamassassin chacking and delivery.
This works because Maildir puts each message in its own file, and
the server name writing the message is part of the file name (I
use the MD5 digest of the message body as part of the sequence in
the file name as well which makes conflicts difficult, and
provides a method of easily detecting identical messages).

Bill
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