Friday, April 29, 2011

NFS over UDP, fast + cheap = not good?

From yesterday's post I took off and started researching ways that NFS over UDP can go wrong. I am now sufficiently scared away from ever writing/appending files on NFS that is using UDP. There are references everywhere to potential data corruption but only a few good sources that will give me anything concrete on the topic. Those references seem to be a bit outdated but the cautious sys-admin/engineer side of me is now screaming, "ok, fast + cheap somehow usually means not good."

Most of the cases I came across dealt with writing via UDP and not so much reading via UDP. There were some cache issues mentioned but we have run into those regardless of UDP/TCP so nothing new there. The particular use-case of the previous test does only need to read but in considering our general systems infrastructure we definitely need write functionality so UDP is probably not a good idea anymore.

Now that the NFS path has been travelled, maybe I can find a better way?

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