Hi there, I'm experiencing a problem with NFS v3. After a rush of data written to a particular NFS partition (to/from NetApp) I have noticed directory listings between three different NFS v3 clients (doing a'ls in the same directory) to see different content. The 'rush of data' included approx 400GB (and took a few hours to do so). The inconsistency that the three clients experienced was still the case 4 hours after the mentioned data rush. I would 'somehow understand' that such a 'data storm' could maybe overwhelm the NFS client's caches - and thus would 'accept' (although not liking it) a delay between the client's cache updates. But that such an inconsistency is still existing 4 hours afterwards is IMHO a plain bug. Question 1: Would you agree that this is a bug or is it 'NFS as designed' ? What I did having seen this is creating a new file in that directory - and voila, all clients immediately got to see the right directory content. This again calmed my nerves as in 'NFS still works'. Having said that - I now did some more testing with this NFS cache delay and noticed that file content updates between the three NFS clients easily takes a few seconds - up to 10-15 seconds. Question 2: Is such a file content delay in NFS 'as designed' - I'm assuming that fiddling with NFS mount parameters could put a 'defined maximum' to such a delay? Or is there no such maximum and under 'bad luck' situations it can go infinitely high (which would be Q1) ? Question 3: What is a suggested best-practice NFS mount parameter set for complying with the following requirements: * lots of reads - tons of files - reads often from different files * few writes - but if written it should propagate to all NFS clients 'immediately' * high load situations (as with the 400GB read/write stuff above) - and after or even during this doing a 'ls' in a directory should produce consistent results on different attached NFS clients Question 4: If we'd somehow manually detected such a directory content inconsistency - would there be something like a 'hey NFS client, flush all NFS caches NOW' thing? Question 5: any of this related to commit 37d9d76d8b3a2ac5817e1fa3263cfe 0fdb439e51: NFS: flush cached directory information slightly more readily. ? Thanks for answers to any or all of above! :) MUCH appreciated! Regards, Stefan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
