NFS scalability

[Matthew Dillon]

:Hi,
:
:At Froscon (open source conference), I attended a talk about 
:web-clustering. The speaker described a system with a dozen web-servers, 
:each of which is connected to a central NAS via NFS to serve files. Of 
:course the main task of the web-servers is to serve dynamic files. The 
:speaker used NFS because it served his needs and was very easy to setup 
:within minutes, unlike GFS.
:
:Just out of interest (without the time/boxes to try it out myself), do 
:you guys think this is a "good" solution? I mean, does NFS handle a lot 
:concurrent accesses well? I never used NFS...
:
:Hehe, I know, using HAMMERFS would be a terrible good solution ;-)
:
:Regards,
:
:   Michael

    NFSv3 has no real cache coherency between clients.  Theoretically
    NFSv4 can but I think the concept of using a centralized filesystem
    in a cluster is a bad idea generally even if it is the easiest 
    solution at the moment.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>