On Sun, 15 Aug 2010 17:11:01 -0400 (EDT) Rick Macklem <rmack...@uoguelph.ca> 
wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have five front end web servers that all mount their content from the same 
>> server via NFS.  If I stress the link on any one of the machines (eg: copy a 
>> large directory with a lot of files to/from the mounted file system) the 
>> client will pause.  That is, all processes trying to access that mount will 
>> freeze.  The log files with hundreds or thousands of nfs server not 
>> responding / is alive again messages. After 60 seconds it returns to normal, 
>> unless the load is still there in which case it continues to pause.
>>
>
>The 60sec delay suggests that the client is doing a TCP reconnect. I'd suggest 
>that you
>look at a packet trace in wireshark (it knows how to decode NFS packets) and 
>see if
>there are new TCP connections (SYN, SYN-ACK,...) being made. If that is what is
>happening, I suspect it is NIC driver related, but it is really hard to say.

I'll try this if/when it happens again.

>If you can try a network interface of a different type (not em) that will 
>check to
>see if it is an em(4) issue.

Unfortunately I don't have any non-em cards around.

>Alternately, you could try turning off the TSO and checksum offload stuff for 
>the
>em(4) and see if that helps.

Hmm, interesting.  The four machines that seem to be working (so far) have 
these enabled by default.  The fifth one has checksums enabled, but not TSO.  
Doesn't appear to support it.

I also tried switching from TCP to UDP.  This seems to be working (so far) on 
four of the clients (which happen to be identical load balanced machines), but 
on the fifth one (which serves a different purpose) I'm getting something 
really weird.  Instead of locking up periodically as before, it's actually 
losing the mount.  For example, a 'df' doesn't include the mounted system.  If 
I try to access the mounted system (with 'ls' for example) I get an "Input / 
output error" message.  I can remount it, but only after I force a dismount.

Mark
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