Evaluating throughput

Throughput refers to the rate at which data is transferred between the NFS client and server systems. Establishing throughput baselines for the Client-Server environments of interest will assist in determining any benefits achieved from tuning. Baselines and measurement techniques are also useful in diagnosing performance problems.

As discussed in How is performance characterized?, a set of work activities or workloads should be identified for measurement. For throughput the type of workload selected should reflect the type of NFS read and write access expected by typical users or specific applications. Consider the following points:

Average file size or range of file sizes
Sequential or random access
Data set types and organizations to be accessed
Requirements for ASCII/EBCDIC translation