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We describe two modifications to the FreeBSD 4.6 NFS
server to increase read throughput by improving the
read-ahead heuristic to deal with reordered requests and
stride access patterns. We show that for some stride
access patterns, our new heuristics improve end-to-end
NFS throughput by nearly a factor of two. We also show
that benchmarking and experimenting with changes to
an NFS server can be a subtle and challenging task, and
that it is often difficult to distinguish the impact of a new
algorithm or heuristic from the quirks of the underlying
software and hardware with which they interact. We discuss these quirks and their potential effects.
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