Most Efficient Network File sharing protocol?

[Ian Malone]

On 5 March 2014 13:21, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
> "Patrick O'Callaghan" <pocallaghan at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 2:34 AM, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>>> As to NFS, I have had bad experiences with it, like network cards
>>> freezing up and computers being halted because NFS failed for unknown
>>> reasons.  I never got it to work reliably and would not recommend using
>>> NFS for anything.
>>
>> I've used NFS reliably for over 20 years. I don't claim it's the best
>> solution for every scenario, but I don't see how the use of a
>> high-level protocol running on top of UDP or IP can freeze a network
>> card. A bad driver or a hardware fault might, but that has nothing to
>> do with NFS.
>
> Yes, it was a cheap crappy network card with a realtek chip at first,
> and changing it for a much better 3Com card didn´t solve the problem.
> Freezes would occur when files were transferred with NFS and otherwise
> not, and not only the network card was frozen.  You had to press the
> reset button.  That was almost 20 years ago.
>
> Some ppl say that NFS stands for "network failure system".  Since I have
> experienced this 'feature' of NFS, I simply don´t recommend NFS, and I
> don´t use it when it can be avoided.
>
> It may still be the best solution for the OP or not.
>

If mounted with the 'hard' option NFS can do that, because a process
is waiting to close a file. It shouldn't freeze the whole system
unless part of the system itself is actually on NFS (home directories
is a common one). But this can be an intentional trade-off, where you
want to make sure the data has actually been written. If you're
hosting data over a network then it is going to be subject to problems
with the network so you need to make a decision as to the behaviour
you'd prefer when that happens, in some cases stop and don't do
anything else is better than carry on regardless.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk