I teach programming to students in a school where they can all login to any computer; their session files being carried by a common NFS server. We experience very slow execution times when we use demanding tools (namely VSCode, Android Studio or other frameworks like Symfony or React). Asking the students to work in local directory like /tmp
is a good workaround but kind of sad as well.
I am not sysadmin but I would love some insights about what could go wrong here:
- Are there common pitfalls that we need to check when it comes to sharing session files on NFS?
- Consider we have about 100 students working simultaneously, my understanding is that the performance of the upstream SSD will be highly divided anyway, so do you consider this kind of architecture viable?
- For many other reasons, I suggest we switch them to laptops, if you take the cost aspects appart, is it more reasonable choice?
/tmp
would be reasonable in this situation.