Hi All,

Thanks to Doug and Kevin for the replies.  In answer to Kevin's question about 
our choice of clustering solution for NFS:  the choice was made hoping to 
maintain some simplicity by not using more than one HA solution at a time.  
However, it seems that this choice might have introduced more wrinkles than 
it's ironed out.


An update on our situation:  we have actually uncovered another clue since my 
last posting.  One thing that this now known to be correlated *very* closely 
with instability in the NFS layer is running `mmcrsnapshot`.    We had noticed 
that flapping happened like clockwork at midnight every night.  This happens to 
be the same time at which our crontab was running the `mmcrsnapshot` so, as an 
experiment, we moved the snapshot to happen at 1a.


After this change, the late-night flapping has moved to 1a and now happens 
reliably every night at that time.  I saw a post on this list from 2013 stating 
that `mmcrsnapshot` was known to hang up the filesystem with race conditions 
that result in deadlocks and am wondering if that is still a problem with the 
`mmcrsnapthost` command.  Running the snapshots had not been an obvious problem 
before, but seems to have become one since we deployed ~300 additional GPFS 
clients in a remote cluster configuration about a week ago.


Can anybody comment on the safety of running `mmcrsnapshot` with a ~300 node 
remote cluster accessing the filesystem?


Also, I would comment that this is not the only condition under which we see 
instability in the NFS layer.  We continue to see intermittent instability 
through the day.  The creation of a snapshot is simply the one well-correlated 
condition that we've discovered so far.


Thanks so much to everyone for your help  :)


Stewart
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