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+
+Kernel NFS Server Statistics
+============================
+
+This document describes the format and semantics of the statistics
+which the kernel NFS server makes available to userspace. These
+statistics are available in several text form pseudo files, each of
+which is described separately below.
+
+In most cases you don't need to know these formats, as the nfsstat(8)
+program from the nfs-utils distribution provides a helpful command-line
+interface for extracting and printing them.
+
+All the files described here are formatted as a sequence of text lines,
+separated by newline '\n' characters. Lines beginning with a hash
+'#' character are comments intended for humans and should be ignored
+by parsing routines. All other lines contain a sequence of fields
+separated by whitespace.
+
+/proc/fs/nfsd/pool_stats
+------------------------
+
+This file is available in kernels from 2.6.30 onwards, if the
+/proc/fs/nfsd filesystem is mounted (it almost always should be).
+
+The first line is a comment which describes the fields present in
+all the other lines. The other lines present the following data as
+a sequence of unsigned decimal numeric fields. One line is shown
+for each NFS thread pool.
+
+All counters are 64 bits wide and wrap naturally. There is no way
+to zero these counters, instead applications should do their own
+rate conversion.
+
+pool
+ The id number of the NFS thread pool to which this line applies.
+ This number does not change.
+
+ Thread pool ids are a contiguous set of small integers starting
+ at zero. The maximum value depends on the thread pool mode, but
+ currently cannot be larger than the number of CPUs in the system.
+ Note that in the default case there will be a single thread pool
+ which contains all the nfsd threads and all the CPUs in the system,
+ and thus this file will have a single line with a pool id of "0".
+
+packets-arrived
+ Counts how many NFS packets have arrived. More precisely, this
+ is the number of times that the network stack has notified the
+ sunrpc server layer that new data may be available on a transport
+ (e.g. an NFS or UDP socket or an NFS/RDMA endpoint).
+
+ Depending on the NFS workload patterns and various network stack
+ effects (such as Large Receive Offload) which can combine packets
+ on the wire, this may be either more or less than the number
+ of NFS calls received (which statistic is available elsewhere).
+ However this is a more accurate and less workload-dependent measure
+ of how much CPU load is being placed on the sunrpc server layer
+ due to NFS network traffic.
+
+sockets-enqueued
+ Counts how many times an NFS transport is enqueued to wait for
+ an nfsd thread to service it, i.e. no nfsd thread was considered
+ available.
+
+ The circumstance this statistic tracks indicates that there was NFS
+ network-facing work to be done but it couldn't be done immediately,
+ thus introducing a small delay in servicing NFS calls. The ideal
+ rate of change for this counter is zero; significantly non-zero
+ values may indicate a performance limitation.
+
+ This can happen either because there are too few nfsd threads in the
+ thread pool for the NFS workload (the workload is thread-limited),
+ or because the NFS workload needs more CPU time than is available in
+ the thread pool (the workload is CPU-limited). In the former case,
+ configuring more nfsd threads will probably improve the performance
+ of the NFS workload. In the latter case, the sunrpc server layer is
+ already choosing not to wake idle nfsd threads because there are too
+ many nfsd threads which want to run but cannot, so configuring more
+ nfsd threads will make no difference whatsoever. The overloads-avoided
+ statistic (see below) can be used to distinguish these cases.
+
+threads-woken
+ Counts how many times an idle nfsd thread is woken to try to
+ receive some data from an NFS transport.
+
+ This statistic tracks the circumstance where incoming
+ network-facing NFS work is being handled quickly, which is a good
+ thing. The ideal rate of change for this counter will be close
+ to but less than the rate of change of the packets-arrived counter.
+
+overloads-avoided
+ Counts how many times the sunrpc server layer chose not to wake an
+ nfsd thread, despite the presence of idle nfsd threads, because
+ too many nfsd threads had been recently woken but could not get
+ enough CPU time to actually run.
+
+ This statistic counts a circumstance where the sunrpc layer
+ heuristically avoids overloading the CPU scheduler with too many
+ runnable nfsd threads. The ideal rate of change for this counter
+ is zero. Significant non-zero values indicate that the workload
+ is CPU limited. Usually this is associated with heavy CPU usage
+ on all the CPUs in the nfsd thread pool.
+
+ If a sustained large overloads-avoided rate is detected on a pool,
+ the top(1) utility should be used to check for the following
+ pattern of CPU usage on all the CPUs associated with the given
+ nfsd thread pool.
+
+ - %us ~= 0 (as you're *NOT* running applications on your NFS server)
+
+ - %wa ~= 0
+
+ - %id ~= 0
+
+ - %sy + %hi + %si ~= 100
+
+ If this pattern is seen, configuring more nfsd threads will *not*
+ improve the performance of the workload. If this patten is not
+ seen, then something more subtle is wrong.
+
+threads-timedout
+ Counts how many times an nfsd thread triggered an idle timeout,
+ i.e. was not woken to handle any incoming network packets for
+ some time.
+
+ This statistic counts a circumstance where there are more nfsd
+ threads configured than can be used by the NFS workload. This is
+ a clue that the number of nfsd threads can be reduced without
+ affecting performance. Unfortunately, it's only a clue and not
+ a strong indication, for a couple of reasons:
+
+ - Currently the rate at which the counter is incremented is quite
+ slow; the idle timeout is 60 minutes. Unless the NFS workload
+ remains constant for hours at a time, this counter is unlikely
+ to be providing information that is still useful.
+
+ - It is usually a wise policy to provide some slack,
+ i.e. configure a few more nfsds than are currently needed,
+ to allow for future spikes in load.
+
+
+Note that incoming packets on NFS transports will be dealt with in
+one of three ways. An nfsd thread can be woken (threads-woken counts
+this case), or the transport can be enqueued for later attention
+(sockets-enqueued counts this case), or the packet can be temporarily
+deferred because the transport is currently being used by an nfsd
+thread. This last case is not very interesting and is not explicitly
+counted, but can be inferred from the other counters thus:
+
+packets-deferred = packets-arrived - ( sockets-enqueued + threads-woken )
+
+
+More
+----
+Descriptions of the other statistics file should go here.
+
+
+Greg Banks <gnb@sgi.com>
+26 Mar 2009