nfs timeouts

[Jeff Roth]

In article <1990Mar20.141744.13910 at neptune.UUCP> orr at neptune.UUCP (Rick Orr)
writes:

|We have @ 15 workstations (sun 3's, sun 4's, dec gpx's, dec 3200) that
|use two sun 4/280's as nfs servers. Most of the workstions are used for
|software developement so a lot of linking and compiling take place
|over the nfs mounts. We keep receiving the following messages:
|
|NFS server moon not responding, still trying
|NFS server moon ok
|
|I assume we are timing out, but I'am not sure.  Is there anyone that
|can tell me how to go about fixing this problem. 

Right, your server is not answering requests fast enough to "satisfy"
the clients. You can try to address the problem on the server by trying
to resolve whatever turns out to be the bottleneck (could be CPU,
or disk access on the server, for example; some tools to help you
figure out what would be systat, iostat, ps, etc.). Or try to split the
the load across several servers. Or try addressing the symptom by
adjusting the initial timeout parameter on the clients, ordinarily
this is one of the parameters used by mount.