Improving NFS client performance

Question

I have my Macbook Pro (MacOS Mojave) connecting to an NFS share on a Linux machine directly connected via Thunderbolt with jumbo frames. Testing with iperf3, I can do ~14 Gbps (~1.8 GBps) over the connection, so I expect that network is not the bottleneck.

Here is the /etc/exports:

/srv/share         169.254.0.*(rw,sync,insecure,rw,all_squash,anonuid=1000,anongid=1000,no_subtree_check)

Doing some simple testing with dd, here is what I see:

Direct to disk on the server (~800MB/s)

~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/testfile bs=5120 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
512000000 bytes (512 MB, 488 MiB) copied, 0.62477 s, 820 MB/s

NFS from the server (~660 MB/s)

I connected a client on the server to see how it performed with a Linux client and taking the network out of the equation.

$ sudo mount -t nfs -o rw 169.254.0.1:/srv/share /tmp/share
$ nfsstat -m
/tmp/share from 169.254.0.1:/srv/share
 Flags: rw,relatime,vers=4.2,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,clientaddr=169.254.0.1,local_lock=none,addr=169.254.0.1
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/share/test_file bs=5120 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
512000000 bytes (512 MB, 488 MiB) copied, 0.76516 s, 669 MB/s

From Macbook Pro over Thunderbolt (~150MBps)

I tried to match the default NFS client connection from Linux, but the Mac client doesn't support the same options. I've tried vers=3 and even async, but am never able to get it much faster than this.

$ sudo mount -t nfs -o rw,vers=4,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,hard,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys 169.254.0.1:/srv/share /srv/share
$ nfsstat -m
/srv/share from 169.254.0.1:/srv/share
  -- Original mount options:
     General mount flags: 0x0
     NFS parameters: vers=4,proto=tcp,hard,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys
     File system locations:
       /srv/share @ 169.254.0.1 (169.254.0.1)
  -- Current mount parameters:
     General mount flags: 0x4000000 multilabel
     NFS parameters: vers=4.0,proto=tcp,port=2049,hard,nointr,noresvport,callback,negnamecache,nonamedattr,noacl,noaclonly,locks,noquota,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,readahead=16,dsize=32768,nordirplus,nodumbtimr,timeo=600,maxgroups=16,acregmin=5,acregmax=60,acdirmin=5,acdirmax=60,nomutejukebox,noephemeral,nonfc,sec=sys
     File system locations:
       /srv/share @ 169.254.0.1 (169.254.0.1)
     Status flags: 0x0
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/share/testfile bs=5120 count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
51200000 bytes transferred in 0.337533 secs (151688873 bytes/sec)

---

Given how fast the network is, it seems like I should be able to get 3-4x the speeds I'm seeing from the Mac. How can I improve the performance?

Answer 1

i was having a lot of trouble with both transfer speed to/from an NFS share, as well as extremely slow performance traversing directories; after mounting a share, listing a directory containing just 5 items would take several seconds..
Accessing the same share via smb was much faster..

i finally found a 'fix' that helped me after looking here, here, and here:

Find out which version of NFS protocol is in place on the server; in may case, it's 4.1..

Now, in the file:

/etc/nfs.conf

add the following line:

nfs.client.mount.options=nolocks,locallocks,vers=4.1

Save and restart..
NFS performance should be much improved..

Noting that you change 4.1 in the line above to whatever version of the protocol your NFS server is using..