Tom,
Maybe we need to actively discourage people from running Postgres against NFS-mounted data directories. Shane Kerr's paper cited above mentions some other rather scary properties, including O_EXCL file creation not really working properly.
Wouldn't you be describing a Linux-specific issue, though? And possibly kernel-specific?
It's hard to reconcile this with the real-world performance of PostgreSQL on NFS, which is happening all over the place. Most notably, Joe Conway's 20,000 txn/sec.
I *do* think it's an accurate statement that if you're going to use Postgres, or any other OLTP database, on NFS you'd better have access to a NAS expert. But to say that it's a bad idea even if you have expert help is probably going to far.
--Josh Berkus ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
