SCO Unix problem with large executables over NFS?

[Steve Elias]

can anyone confirm or deny the following as a bug or feature?

when we run large executables off of an NFS mounted drive under SCO
Unix, the process will sometimes die off randomly, occasionally
reporting that it has received a kill signal.  we've seen this
behavior with both gnu emacs and a large document prep system.

since we've put emacs and the doc system on a local hard disk, we've
never seen this sort of process death.

our ethernet is known to drop packets occasionally, leading me to:

theory #1.  ahem.  ahem.  theory #1, which is mine (ours):

when pagedaemon (or appropriate kernel portion) tries to page in some
requested text pages across NFS, and the network drops packet(s),
pagedaemon sends a kill signal to the process which needs the text
page.  restated: something causes the process to die ungracefully if
it can't get its requested page fast enough across NFS.  perhaps there
is some sort of "retry" parameter which can be adjusted.  i've never
seen this behavior on either HPs or Suns running executables across
NFS, so i doubt this is supposed to be happening.

can any of yall confirm or deny this behavior and/or theory?

btw, this "sco-list at uunet.uu.net" has proved to be very valuable for
obtaining timely fixes and feedback on SCO Unix.  three cheers!

[note that this question is posted separately to comp.protocols.nfs
 and comp.unix.sysv386.]
 
/eli

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