[Yum] yum repository NFS vs HTTP performance

[Brian Long]

On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 16:45 -0700, Greg Retkowski wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>   I've looked in the usual places but can't find an answer to this
> question, so I figured I'd pose it here to lots of folks who've got real
> world experience in this area. I have a farm of around 50 machines,
> growing rapidly, using yum to perform system package installation and
> updates. We are moving our yum repository to a new machine so it's a
> good time to evaluate if we want to stick with running our repository
> over NFS.  From a purely performance standpoint is it better to have a
> Yum repository run from NFS or over HTTP? I'd love to hear some
> experiences from folks running yum repositories for clusters and what
> they have learned on this issue.

Greg,

To be honest, we never even tested NFS since we have over 4,000 yum
clients spread across the globe.  Currently, about 1/3 go over a WAN
connection to our yum HTTP servers which are a 3-node load-balanced web
farm.  We didn't set up the load-balanced farm for scalability, just
reliability.  Plus, this web farm houses a bunch of other internal
applications geared towards Linux.

I think we all know that NFS over the WAN usually performs horribly, so
we didn't consider it  :)  In the case of your cluster, if they're all
in the same data center or lab, I don't know why you would choose one
over the other except if you also want to use HTTP load balancing.

/Brian/

-- 
       Brian Long                      |         |           |
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