Ellard, DanielSeltzer, Margo2009-04-242003Ellard, Daniel and Margo Seltzer. 2003. NFS tricks and benchmarking traps. Proceedings of the FREENIX track, 2003 USENIX annual technical conference: June 9-14, 2003, San Antonio, Texas, ed. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, 101-114. Berkeley, California: USENIX Association.http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:2799040We describe two modi cations to the FreeBSD 4.6 NFS server to increase read throughput by improving the read-ahead heuristic to deal with reordered requests and stride access patterns. We show that for some stride access patterns, our new heuristics improve end-to-end NFS throughput by nearly a factor of two. We also show that benchmarking and experimenting with changes to an NFS server can be a subtle and challenging task, and that it is often difficult to distinguish the impact of a new algorithm or heuristic from the quirks of the underlying software and hardware with which they interact. We discuss these quirks and their potential effects.en-US