CODEWITHSUNDEEP
performancehttpfilesystemsnfs
Alfred Pitchcock
Alfred Pitchcock

Reputation:

Data Transfer Speeds: NFS vs HTTP

Am currently considering using REST access to Nirvanix online storage to store/download files. However, Nirvanix also offers NFS access to the network storage.

I was wondering if there are any known benchmarks or protocol-specific reasons for choosing REST over NFS?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 10218

Answers (4)

Peter
Peter

Reputation: 38475

They should be almost the same, but there is one big difference NFS normally works over UDP(can be configured to run over TCP) and HTTP over TCP.. so if you have a high packet loss then HTTP should be more stable!

Upvotes: 3

John Saunders
John Saunders

Reputation: 161783

NFS is not a file transfer protocol, it's a Network File System protocol. Properly configured and implemented, it should be possible for HTTP to beat it easily.

It will depend on the details of what you're trying to do. If you're just uploading and downloading entire files, then I suspect you'll be able to configure HTTP to do a lot better than NFS.

Recall also that NFS was created in an earlier time. Is NFS 2.0 still the latest version? I recall updating the code of an NFS implementation from 2 to 3. That was in 1996 or so.

Upvotes: 2

Nicholas Knight
Nicholas Knight

Reputation: 16045

Use whatever best fits your environment. Any difference is going to be negligible, especially over non-LAN-speed links where things like CPU usage become irrelevant as they're overwhelmed by the simple fact that the link is already saturated.

One possible exception is dealing with lots of little files. If your use case involves rapid access to a lot of little files, I'd suggest testing both and seeing if one is faster by a large enough margin to matter.

Upvotes: 5

Avery Payne
Avery Payne

Reputation: 1748

It's a toss-up.

NFS, with the right setup, version, and tuning, is just a tad slower than SMB/CIFS. Older versions, however, can be significantly slower.

What you do gain with NFS is:

  • primitive file access control (via standard Unix file permissions)
  • primitive share access control
  • user mapping
  • For those platforms that support it, a near-invisibility with regard to operation. It looks just like another subdirectory...

However, if you are not working in a 100% NFS environment, you might find that it's not worth the effort.

By the way, for the record, Windows 7 Beta/RC does support NFS out of the box.

Upvotes: 3

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