On Mon, Jan 10, 2000 at 11:20:06PM +0100, Carel Fellinger wrote > Now that I've two machines I'm finally able to experience the full benefits > of Debian GNU/Linux. Reading all I could find on the subject on the HAMM-cd's > I managed to get nfs and nis working, exported /home and did some tests. > > using ncftp I get the expected 1.0+MBs transfer copying a large file into > /dev/null. Quite reasonable on a 10Mbs ethernet considering ftp and tcp each > adding their things. But if I do dd -if=/home/biggy of=/dev/null it takes > 10 times more then doing it locally and only fills a little more than > half the ethernet bandwith! how come? would it help to switch to 100Mbs > Ethernet? or has nfs so much overhead (but ftp does okee)? or is the 486 > the culprit? >
NFS is stateless and thus has significantly higher overhead than (say) ftp (although, being stateless has its advantages - you can reboot the server and suffer nothing worse than a long pause). NFS under Linux 2.0 lives largely in userspace, which hurts performance a little also. Use NFS for convenience, but if you want to copy large chunks between machines fast consider using ftp or scp. John P. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark
