Home directories on NFS

[Michael Hirsch]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Alvin <info at alvin.be> wrote:
> I'm having major difficulties with a new server setup. Maybe it's a bit much
> to want at once, but here is what I want:
>
> - Ubuntu server with kvm/qemu [DONE]
> - Ubuntu JeOS with Kubuntu on that server [INSTALLED]
> - remote acces with XDMCP [DONE]
> - Home directories on NFS share [?]
>
> Well, installing everything was no problem, but I have several difficulties. I
> tried using a Solaris 10 server with ZFS filesystems as NFS server.
> Performance was horrible. Starting any program (like Dolphin) took several
> minutes. Moving a window was something that could be done with a lot of
> patience.
>
> Thinking it was the Solaris implementation of NFS, I tried using the virtual
> host as an NFS server. That worked a whole lot better. Desktop performance is
> very good.

In general, if only home dirs are on NFS I wouldn't expect much
performance impost on application startup.  I suppose if the
application is also stored in the home dir there would be performance
impact.

In general, whene I have unexplained performance problems, look at
your networking.  If DNS is not working right, that could explain the
pause.  A firewall could prevent identd or some other server from
working and the pause could be caused by waiting for a timeout.

>
> However, now I noticed that Akonadi does not work. It just will not start. The
> first time, akonadi took the whole virtual machine down during the time where
> you see the program bar. (That's right. I couldn't even get in with ssh
> anymore.) I already tried setting the apparmor profile to complain instead of
> enforce. This makes no difference.
>
> What could I be doing wrong? I'm starting to fear Akonadi just doesn't like
> NFS, but that would be a disaster. Can anyone confirm this?

You could use strace to see what akonadi is doing when it starts.  Is
everything slow, or are there particular calls that make it hang?

Michael