Linux – Using TCP protocol for NFS mount points on linux servers

When a client request comes in, it gets handed off to one of the threads and the rest of the threads are asked to do read-ahead operations. The fastest way to read a file is to have one thread do it sequentially... So for one file this is overkill, and the threads are in essence making more work for themselves. But what's true for 1 client reading 1 file won't necessarily be true when you deploy in the real world, so stick with the formula for basing number of threads and number of read-aheads off bandwidth/cpu specs.

If you're running Ubuntu with GUI user logins such as LTSP, it's very possible that the clients are the problem.

The Gnome-Settings-Daemon has a nasty habit of digging around inside the NFS mounts to check the state of any trash folders it finds. This problem exists in Ubuntu 9.10 and likely also in 10.04.

This is hard-coded in the Ubuntu distribution and was erroneously dropped in the 9.x releases. It is reported to be fixed in later Ubuntu releases and a common symptom is high load average while the NFS mounts are unreachable.