Duane Schaub writes: > Yes - but how many users (on a typical ISP) will this support? My > experience with NFS suggests that the number is less than 10000 accounts. > In an early trial, reguardless of load, checking a POP account required > 10-15seconds each. Normally, the same check is instantaneous on local > drives. On the pop server, we normally have 5-10 simultaneous sessions on
And this is not surprising. NFS runs on top of your FS and network, which themselves can be bottlenecks for busy servers, with NFS you just add another bottleneck and all the bugs, race conditions, and locking problems in its code to your software. Case in point: Sqwebmail requires clocks to be synchronized if used over NFS. Many other services require uid space to be synchronized. NFS requires the software to be specially written with it in mind. The problem for clusters is an FS which shares the storage to every node, not file sharing over the network. NFS is just a wrong solution for the problem.
