Microsoft KB Archive/241432

= NFS Server Performance Tuning Parameters for Services for UNIX =

Article ID: 241432

Article Last Modified on 11/1/2006

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Windows NT Services for UNIX Add-On Pack

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This article was previously published under Q241432



SUMMARY
You can tune the NFS Server component of Services for UNIX (SFU) to some degree for improved performance, especially when a large number of files or folders is being shared.



MORE INFORMATION
The performance of large Windows NT NFS file shares (exports) is related to the following factors:  Inode entries must be generated for all possible file names. For MS-DOS compatibility, the NTFS file system always generates another file name for any name that does not conform to the normal MS-DOS 8.3 file name specification. However, it takes some time to verify that these automatically generated file names are unique within the folder. If you can reasonably restrict file naming to the 8.3 convention, you should do so. The size of the inode file directly relates to the speed at which it can be parsed. It is important to keep this file entirely in memory. For each drive on the Windows NT NFS server, you should set the Inode Cache Size setting to adequately hold the number of inode entries required for all of the files shared by NFS for all NFS shares on that particular drive. Typically, the minimum inode file requirement is:

((the number of files shared + the total number of folders within all of the shares) * 2)

Keep the number of folder levels to a minimum to reduce the size of this cache.

 Increase the number of directory cache pages to provide storage in memory for all of the folder information on all NFS shares on the server. The number of directory cache pages required is also proportional to the number of folder levels for each NFS share. The fewer the levels, the smaller the number of cache pages required. These are 4-kilobyte (KB) pages, so the maximum amount of folder information that can be stored in memory is 4 megabytes (MB). If you need more storage, the folder information is not cached, but is read directly from disk (which slows performance). It is important, for fast performance, that all directory information be read from cache. Disable all symbolic link support. Symbolic link support degrades performance and should be disabled if not needed.

Keywords: kbenv kbinfo KB241432

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