# Compress NFS?



## monty_hall (Dec 25, 2008)

I currently have a diskless FreeBSD machine that is tethered over a 100 mega bit network to a NFS server.  Is there a way to compress a NFS connection to enhance speed?

Monty


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## brd@ (Dec 25, 2008)

Not via NFS. I'm not sure that it would speed anything up because of the extra overhead it would add. You might try tweaking some of the NFS options to see if that helps. I would try a TCP mount if you aren't already doing that and increasing the read and write data sizes.


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## SaveTheRbtz (Dec 29, 2008)

iirc jumbo frames could help, if supported by hardware


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## Djn (Dec 30, 2008)

As a test, you could set up a compressed SSH tunnel and try mounting the drive through that. I have no idea what the overhead for the encryption would be, but there's a chance it might be low enough to make it worthwhile.


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## rwatson@ (Jan 4, 2009)

Although I've never used it, IPSEC actually does support a compression transfer, which you can use to transparently compress traffic between two hosts. How effective it is will depend on how compressible (redundant) the data is between them. You might find that for things like directory data it is quite effective, however, even if the data itself isn't.


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## plamaiziere (Jan 4, 2009)

rwatson@ said:
			
		

> Although I've never used it, IPSEC actually does support a compression transfer, which you can use to transparently compress traffic between two hosts. How effective it is will depend on how compressible (redundant) the data is between them. You might find that for things like directory data it is quite effective, however, even if the data itself isn't.



Hello,

I never tried it but IPCOMP seems broken since FAST_IPSEC.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/123587


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## cfatienza (Jan 23, 2009)

How many diskless clients do you have on your systems and running what version of FreeBSD? If your running FreeBSD 7.0 is much faster than 6.x and a lot of improvement on FreeBSD 7.1 to 15-20% on nfs. What application are you trying to run on you diskless clients?


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