FreeBSD 8.0 NFS performance

[mickey]

Now that all machines in my network are upgraded from 7.2 to 8.0-RELEASE-p1, I am noticing a significant NFS performance decrease on my notebook.

The notebook is connected via wireless LAN, the NFS server is on a wired subnet, so both machines are on different physical network segments. I have been using NFSv3 with TCP mounts quite some time with 7.2 without seeing any unusual problems.

Now with 8.0 on client/server, directory listings seem to take unusually long. For example $ ls -al /usr/ports/sysutils on an NFS mounted /usr/ports takes 1:49.60.

I have tried various mount options, including rsize=1024, but have not had any luck so far. The firewall on the router does not show any dropped packets either. Using the same NFS mount on a machine connected to the wired network performs normal.

Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

 

[DutchDaemon]

Does an 'ls' or an 'ls -aln' go faster? If so, maybe user/group mapping are problematic.

 

[mickey]

Does an 'ls' or an 'ls -aln' go faster? If so, maybe user/group mapping are problematic.

# time ls /usr/ports/sysutils
0.135u 0.031s 0:00.29 55.1%    31+1058k 0+0io 0pf+0w

# time ls -aln /usr/ports/sysutils
0.182u 0.336s 1:08.88 0.7%     33+1155k 0+0io 0pf+0w

That's quite a big difference. How comes? And why hasn't this been a problem with 7.2?

For comparison, the same taken on a machine connected to the wired ethernet:

# time ls /mnt/sysutils
0.073u 0.026s 0:00.57 15.7%     40+1321k 0+0io 0pf+0w

# time ls -aln /mnt/sysutils
0.056u 0.106s 0:01.99 7.5%      41+1456k 0+0io 0pf+0w

I could verify, that another notebook connected via the same wireless lan does show the same symptoms.

 

[mickey]

Some further investigation into this issue has revealed, that disabling the use of fast frames on the wireless network keeps the NFS problem from occurring.

I am still at a loss though to understand fully, why this problem arises with fast frames enabled in the first place, and whether there is a solution to get both working together, which would be desirable.