nfs file access statistics

Question

For a Linux NFSv3 server, is there any way to see statistics on actual file access? In other words, I would like to see a timestamped log of every file read or written.

Motivation: I have several NFS servers that are slated to be replaced by some kind of "big iron" storage system. In my particular case, the NFS client load is virtually all reads of large files (averaging around 700 MB). One vendor's solution uses a large RAM disk as a cache to provide the kind of massive random read throughput that I need.

What I want is a way to study what the NFS file access pattern looks like so that I can "right size" the cache.

Answer 1

Take a look at nfsstat. It can produce statistics for both a NFS client and server. It's a part of nfs-common on Ubuntu Linux. You can also look at iotop for the server-side, but that reports all disk I/O, not just NFS.