[rescue] Slow NFS between Sun-3 and Raspberry Pi 2

Shawn Neely maxweb at pacbell.net
Tue Mar 29 18:17:30 CDT 2016


I recently got a diskless Sun-3/60LE up and running NetBSD 7.0 using a
Raspberry Pi 2 B (running the latest Debian/Raspbian Jessie) as a network boot
and NFS server.B  I'm still working out a few kinks, but the first is the slow
speed of my network file accesses.
I measured SD card write performance directly on the RPi2B like this:
$ cd /tmp
$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=ddfile bs=8k count=250000 && sync"; rm
ddfile
The above test averages around 11 MB per second.B  However, when I run the
exact same command on the Sun-3/60LE in a FreeBSD shell, using the same SD
card (NFS-mounted in this case) for storage, I get only about 100 KB per
second... less than 1% of the speed measured on the RPi2B.
The Sun-3/60LE AUI Ethernet is attached to a 10Base-T adapter and a router
running DD-WRT in Client mode which also connects the RPi2B via Cat-5 cable.B 
I'd expect to get about 1 MB (10Mbps) through the Ethernet connection, but I'm
still an order of magnitude off that, throughput-wise.

Any thoughts or suggestions?B  Compiling a simple hello_world.c program takes
a good 5 minutes with this set-up.B  Could the router be the problem?B  My IP
addresses are static so maybe I could just try a simple hub instead, but I
like the fact that the router in Client mode provides WiFi network access for
both machines.
Another thought is to find an external SCSI-1 drive to mount locally on the
Sun-3/60LE, and just use the RPi2B for network booting.
Or maybe there are NFS or mount options I can set to make things faster?B  I
basically just copied some steps I found online
here:http://jonsip.sdf.org/netboot.txt
which adds the following lines to /etc/exports on the RPi2B side:
/export/sun3/root sun3(rw,no_root_squash)
/export/sun3/swap sun3(rw,no_root_squash)
/export/sun3/usr sun3(rw,root_squash)
/export/sun3/home sun3(rw,root_squash
and the following /etc/fstab lines on the Sun-3/60LE side:
nfsserver:/export/sun3/swapB B B  noneB B B  swapB B B  sw,nfsmntpt=/swap
nfsserver:/export/sun3/rootB B B  /B B B  nfsB B B  rw 0 0
nfsserver:/export/sun3/usrB B B  /usrB B B  nfsB B B  rw 0 0
nfsserver:/export/sun3/homeB B B  /homeB B B  nfsB B B  rw 0 0
Any bits of wisdom or other thoughts regarding file I/O speed improvements
would be most appreciated!
thanks,
Shawn NeelyOakland, CA


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