Once mounted ‘nfsstat -m’ was run to verify that the mount point was mounted with the correct version specified for the test. The NFS clients are mounting the mount points from the NFS server with the version specified in each test to ensure that they are mounting as the correct version for the particular test. This was done to help illustrate how far things have come since version 2, as CentOS 7 and above no longer support NFS version 2. The NFS version 2 results should therefore be taken with a grain of salt as they were run on a different operating system which still had support for version 2. The CentOS 7 servers were also set up to act as an NFS server and NFS client, they were used for the NFS version 3, 4 and 4.1 tests.
The CentOS 6.6 servers were used to benchmark NFS version 2, one acting as the NFS server and the other as the NFS client. Out test environment contains four servers, two running CentOS 6.6 and two running CentOS. With over 20 years of difference between version 2 and version 4.1 of NFS we would definitely expect to see performance improvements, let’s take a look! The test environment To help give you an idea of how far NFS has come, below are the RFCs which indicate the month and year of each protocol. While there are lots of other notable changes between these versions, our testing is only concerned with the performance aspects of sequential read/write and random read/write speeds. Here we are going to compare the performance of NFS versions 2, 3, 4, and 4.1 to get idea of how things have progressed over time, the results are quite surprising. How has the performance of NFS changed over the years between the different versions? The Network File System (NFS) protocol has been around since the ’80s which is quite ancient in the realm of technology, and yet is still used widely.