Rick Macklem wrote:
>In case anyone is interested in testing and/or reviewing the patch,
>it is at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D30970.
>
>Only lightly tested at this point.
>
>The NFS mount option is "nconnect=<N>", where 2<= N <= 16,
>same as Linux. (I haven't done a man page patch yet.)
I have updated the patch so that the original TCP connection is
used for RPCs that consist of small messages (therefore not needing
much network bandwidth) and the RPCs (Read/Readdir/Write) that
use larger messages are sent on the N-1 additional TCP connections
in a round robin fashion.

The message below was posted a couple of days ago on linux-...@vger.kernel.org.
It might be unfair to put it here, out of context, but I think it at least
suggests that separating the larger RPC messages from the small ones
(mostly Lookup/Getattr/Access metadata related RPCs) may be useful
under certain circumstances.
> The original issue described was how a high read/write process on the
> client could slow another process trying to do heavy metadata
> operations (like walking the filesystem). Using a different mount to
> the same multi-homed server seems to help a lot (probably because of
> the independent slot table).
--> For this implementation, there is no separate session/slot table.
      (Note that each I/O RPC only uses one table slot.)

I did not make this small vs large RPCs on a separate TCP connection
a separate option, since I believe there are already too many mount options.
If others feel it should be a separate mount option, please speak up.

The phabricator patch has been updated. Please test/review/comment.

Thanks, rick

Thanks everyone, for your input, rick

________________________________________
From: Peter Eriksson <p...@lysator.liu.se>
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2021 5:11 AM
To: Rick Macklem
Cc: freebsd-net
Subject: Re: RFC: NFS trunking (multiple TCP connections for a mount

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the University of Guelph. Do not 
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> I don't understand how multiple TCP connections to the same
> server IP address will distribute the load across multiple network
> interfaces?
> I thought that lagg would have handled this?


A lagg typically keeps all data in a TCP stream on a specific lagg member 
(depending on how the lagg is set up, unless you select the “roundrobin” option 
in freebsd -  don’t do that unless you like out-of-order packets…)

Network equipment with laggs typically hash the IP streams over the lagg 
members based on MAC addresses (source&target), IP addresses (source&target) 
and port numbers.

(We have been diagnosing a fun problem locally where we see packet 
losses/performance drops over our internal backbone network for certain 
combinations of odd/even IP addresses/port numbers when things pass certain SPB 
“routers” (which typically hash the streams over many “channels” between 
routers)… Fun fun. :-)

I think the multiple NFS TCP streams could make for some nice performance 
improvements in certain cases. And it would be a more generalisation of having 
multiple streams between two hosts - one-or-many over IPv4 and one-or-many over 
IPv6 at the same time. Windows SMB has a similar feature.

Just avoid the Linux NFS mounting deadlock issue with “down” servers please  :-)

- Peter


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