Terrible NFS performance under 9.2-RELEASE?

[J David]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 6:20 PM, Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca> wrote:
> Oh, and remember to try setting readahead=8 in your mounts, too. NFS will
> do a read + N readaheads (where N == 1 by default) and then wait for
> replies to those before continuing on.

Predictably, this has no effect on anything but sequential reads.

No tuning is going to change the fact that writing 14MiB/sec from the
client to the server results in 200+ MiB/sec of wasted traffic being
sent from the server back to the client.

This is from the client's interface during a write-only test:

      Interface           Traffic               Peak                Total


        vtnet1  in    202.838 MB/s        219.467 MB/s          359.898 GB

                 out    14.127 MB/s         14.346 MB/s           96.503 GB


If write performance did get to wire speed on this workload, the most
it could ever do would be <128MiB/sec, because the unused backflow of
2GiB/sec would max out the interface.

Thanks!