NFS stops responding

[Benjamin Scott]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Ric Werme <ewerme at comcast.net> wrote:
>>   It doesn't help that, in early implementations at least, NFS's
>> default error recovery mechanism is apparently "hang the whole machine
>> until it starts working again".
>
> News to me, except on diskless clients with too little RAM.

  Sigh.  For any given problem, there's always someone who pipes up,
saying they've never had the problem, implying it therefore must not
exist.  :)  All I know is the problem exist(s|ed) for some significant
number of people.  I've even got personal experience with it, from the
UNH lab where I once worked.  Now, I suspect *every* possible computer
problem existed in that lab, so this isn't necessarily indicative of a
trend, but there's even some commentary about this failure mode in
/The Jargon File/; look under "nightmare file system".

  This was also 15 years ago, maybe things suck less now.

> Heck, my RedHat 5.2 system could hang on low memory scenarios without
> NFS's assistance.

  Don't worry, Red Hat Enterprise 5.4 can do that too.  Red Hat's good
about preserving functionality across releases.  ;-)

  But the fact that other things suck too doesn't make sucky NFS not suck.  :)

-- Ben