I figured out what is happening with my big file transfers.
I'm pushing the file from a Duron 750Mhz box to a Cyrix 300Mhz
box.  The faster machine swamps out the slower one which then
drops frames.  The default NFS timeout doesn't handle this
well, while a TCP transfer has a more aggressive/shorter timeout.
My throughput tests didn't take into account the disk IO activity
so showed much better capability.

Concerning my whining about NFS hanging on me, this appears to
be me doing something stupid.  It only happens if I have a
client box try and access a server that has been disconnected.
Then the client app hangs, and when I shut down it will hang
forever at "Unmounting NFS filesystems" stage.
I also found that if I kill the "login" process associated with the
app that hangs, then it will shut down fine.


On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 12:29:14PM -0500, Florin Iucha wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 12:12:02PM -0500, Karl Bongers wrote:
> > statelessness is only a matter of degree.
> > If its so state-less then how come my machine hangs
> > on some NFS daemon when I go to shut-down after forgetting to
> > close up a NFS connection?  Geez, thats annoying.
> 
> Because you asked it to read something from that server and it is doing
> just that: sending requests to that server.
> 
> > Anyone know some configuration magic to avoid this?
> > Anyway to gracefully deal with this when it happens without
> > just slamming power off?
> 
> RTFM: http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/client.html
> 
> florin
>