[SGVLUG] Distributed filesystems

[Terry Hancock]

On Wednesday 22 June 2005 05:29 pm, John Riehl wrote:
> Terry Hancock wrote:
> > music files. Needless to say, playing MP3s in XMMS via an
> > NFS mount is an uninspiring experience.  :-/
> 
> That's odd.  I play lots of music via NFS as well as samba mounted disk 
> at work. I havent had a problem.  I am a couple of router hops away, it 
> is only a 100 mbit line,  and I am competing with a large quatity of 
> other traffic.

"only a 100 mbit line" he says.  :-P

> what is your network like?   switch or hub?  wires or wireless? what is 
> your server like?

It's a mess and it's antiquated, but I am not motivated to fix that if this
is the only use case (and it is).  Copying files from one system to another
is not inordinately slow, but anything that requires fast disk performance
obviously suffers from use over NFS.  No doubt this has to do with using
an ancient 10 mbit hub and driver problems on at least one ethernet card,
but somehow my antiquated, "bottlenecked", "poorly configured" network
manages to wheeze through most tasks I need it for.

MP3 is actually a bad example.  WAV files are more likely to cause problems.
Certainly full-motion video will (which I don't currently use, but I can
imagine I will).

I would hope it is clear that using *ANY* system which accesses data
on a remote system's hard drive is going to be slow compared to getting
it from a local drive.

> certainly rsyncing your files locally and running that will avoid the 
> problem. I dont think your problem is inherently NFS.

That's probably the best solution, I guess. I had been thinking that it
might be easier to set up a solution at the filesystem level.  But it sounds
like not.   Rsync and a cron job may be the best thing, I suppose.

Thanks for the replies,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com