performance issues - NFS (automount) and (almost) diskless client

[Jeffrey Ross]

This is my first stab at using the auto mount for NFS and its been a very
long time since I've played with NFS.

I have two systems running Fedora, the NFS server which is running Fedora
16, and the client which is running Fedora 19 (beta), both are X86_64

The server, it's running RAID-1 (for all partitions including the boot
partition, the client has a boot disk but is auto mounting the home
directories from the server.  The server is also serving window's CIFS
shares. (also the home directory to several Windows 7 systems)


My /etc/auto.misc entry on the client reads:
      home            -rw,auto,suid,sync server:/home

The exports entry looks like:
      /home
172.18.19.0/24(rw,no_root_squash,no_all_squash,sync,no_subtree_check)

Network connectivity is 100Mb/s FDX ethernet (through a Cisco 2948 switch)

What I am seeing is basic file access is good but when I run a browser
(Firefox) on the client I can see a large amount of disk I/O on the server
(looking at the HD LED indicator) and performance is sluggish.  I suspect
its the browser cache files and I could probably pick better options for
performance, I think for starters I probably want async instead of sync.

The other question, is it possible to leave just the browser cache files
locally?  I know I can leave the users' home directories local and then
mount the NFS directory someplace within the home directory, but that's
ugly and its too easy to leave files in the local home directory which
defeats the purpose of having a dedicated fileserver.

Thanks, Jeff