We had a very similar situation when we first connected an F760 toH
 P-UX 10.20. Performance was very poor initially, after some investigation we 
found that having no (0) biods running we got much better performance. This can 
be changed on HP-UX (10.20 or 11.00) by changing NUM_NFSIOD in the 
/etc/rc.config.d/nfsconf file.
 
Nobody could tell me exactly how 
the system was working with no biod processes but it does.
We have a couple of HP-UX 11.0 systems running Oracle 8i 
(8.1.6).  Each of these systems has about 10-15 small to medium sizedO
 racle databases on the system.  In order to separate tables, logs, and 
archives for availability and recovery in the event of a filer volume failure, 
we are using 3 volumes per database.  We are using qtrees allow for the 
mounting the database tables, logs, and archives separately which allows us to 
use failover between the HP servers for each database.  This all boils down 
to needing 45+ NFS mounts per client.
 
HP still uses separate biod processes (the default is 4 biod 
processes) , and I think each running biod can handle 2 concurrent I/O requests 
(this may or may not be configurable by through some kernel parameter - not sure 
what the parameter is though).
 
Does anyone know how to tune the HP-UX client for 
the best performance for this many mounts?  I currently think we should 
bump up the number of biod processes to about 32.  We will probably bump up 
to 16 for a while just as an intermediate test before we go to 32.  Does 
anyone know of other changes that will increase NFS client 
performance?
 
Rick Hulsey
Southwest Airlines
2425 
Wyman
Mail Stop 4DC
Dallas, Tx., 75235
rick.hulsey@wnco.com
(214) 792-7188 
Office
(972) 880-6882 Cell
(800) 915-3747 
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