Planet Ergo

Where <server> is my fileserver with a bunch of terabyte drives, my NFS clients get this message every once in a while (like every minute or so):

kernel: nfs server <server> not responding, still trying
kernel: nfs server <server> OK

Sometimes, in between these two messages, there's a couple of seconds. That can't be good ;-)

Most of the time, it's just the server being overloaded. Since most of my boxes at home are pimped yet slow desktop form-factor machines, this can happen. Google will show you the exact right hits on this phenomenon.

However, I found out there's another cause as well. Note how /etc/sysconfig/nfs has a setting, commented out by default, that says:

# Number of nfs server processes to be started.
# The default is 8.
#RPCNFSDCOUNT=8

Such I changed to 24, restarted NFS et voila! Yet another teeny weeny setting to tweak ;-)