On 10/19/05, Brian Long <brilong@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 16:45 -0700, Greg Retkowski wrote: > > Hello Everyone, > > I've looked in the usual places but can't find an answer to this > > question, so I figured I'd pose it here to lots of folks who've got real > > world experience in this area. I have a farm of around 50 machines, > > growing rapidly, using yum to perform system package installation and > > updates. We are moving our yum repository to a new machine so it's a > > good time to evaluate if we want to stick with running our repository > > over NFS. From a purely performance standpoint is it better to have a > > Yum repository run from NFS or over HTTP? I'd love to hear some > > experiences from folks running yum repositories for clusters and what > > they have learned on this issue. > > Greg, > > To be honest, we never even tested NFS since we have over 4,000 yum > clients spread across the globe. Currently, about 1/3 go over a WAN > connection to our yum HTTP servers which are a 3-node load-balanced web > farm. We didn't set up the load-balanced farm for scalability, just > reliability. Plus, this web farm houses a bunch of other internal > applications geared towards Linux. > > I think we all know that NFS over the WAN usually performs horribly, so > we didn't consider it :) In the case of your cluster, if they're all > in the same data center or lab, I don't know why you would choose one > over the other except if you also want to use HTTP load balancing. > I think you could generalize the question and get the same answer: Is NFS ever higher performance than HTTP? I thought that the answer was that HTTP wins almost every (maybe every) time. Greg
