Hello,
Thought I'd try out this list in the hope of sharing some info with others as opposed to bugging NetApp support only for my own sake ;) (but I'll CC them at least)
I'm setting up an F540 as a newsspool NFS server. That is, I will store Usenet news articles on it. A handful of machines will mount the filesystem read-only and these machines will accept user newsreader connections. Then I will have one single machine that mount the filesystem read/write - it will be the machine that stores incoming articles and removes old ones from the filer.
Now, for news I've got the advice to use NFS v2 because clients using v3 issue the readdir+ operation unique to v3 and this operation does some extra stuff (as opposed to v2's readdir) that most applications take advantage of but news software (INN nnrpd) has no use of the extra data returned by readdir+ and this makes it a performance loss to use v3 in this particular case.
But... I've read that NFS writes are much faster in NFS v3 than v2. This, of course, leads me to my question (ta-daa) :
Actually, I'll make it two questions. If the anser to the first one is no, the second one is not so interesting anymore ;)
1. Are write operations slower on a NetApp server if you use NFS v2 compared to when you're using NFS v3? (and if so, about how much does it differ?)
2. (if the answer to the above question was 'yes') Could I leave the option "nfs.v3.enable" ON, on the NetApp and mount the filesystem from the reader clients using e.g "mount -o vers=2,proto=udp" (can't remember the exact syntax) while at the same time, from the client that is supposed to be doing a lot of *writing* to the NetApp, mount using version 3 to speed up the writes? This machine won't be running nnrpd so it won't be doing any readdir+ in vain.
Regards,
/Ragnar, Algonet