Weird timeouts, not sure if I've set the right threshholds

[Cliff Wells]

On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 16:44 -0400, Denis S. Filimonov wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Can anyone explain the prejudice against NFS?

I hadn't noticed any.  It's more a question of using the wrong tool for
this job.  NFS is great if you need normal filesystem access for a
workgroup.  It's the wrong tool for serving web content.

> Specifically, why would additional proxy hop be faster than serving files from 
> NFS? 

Because I'm betting Nginx is faster than NFS.  

> I can see two points in favor of NFS:
> - NFS client caches files while Nginx doesn't (yet)

But you *must* use Nginx if you want your files available on the web (or
more exactly, some HTTP server).  Caching is almost wholly irrelevant if
you go through a layer that doesn't cache.  The only overhead being
eliminated by NFS caching is that of NFS itself.

> - Nginx doesn't support keepalive connections to upstream, hence additional 
> latencies and traffic for TCP handshake/finalization. NFS doesn't have this 
> issue since it typically works over UDP.

Except that you ignore all the other overhead NFS imposes at a different
layer.  NFS may use a fairly efficient network protocol, however it's
also a fairly complete virtual filesystem, and this emulation imposes
significant overhead that a simple HTTP server doesn't have.

> I do have a couple boxes serving a lot of traffic (mostly PHP) from NFS. It 
> works just fine, though it did take some NFS tuning.

I'm sure apps would run just fine off NFS, since they are typically
read-once, run-many.  Serving a few static files from NFS would probably
be okay too, because the caching would help.  Serving lots of static
files over NFS is probably going to suck badly unless your NFS server
has tons of RAM for cache and even then I doubt it will perform very
well.

At the end of the day, I suggest the OP *try* both methods and let the
tests decide.  In the time it took to write this reply the OP could have
tested both cases and this discussion would have been moot.

Regards,
Cliff