Poor NFS performance in Ubuntu Breezy with fs mounted from a Debian 3.1 server

[Erling Ringen Elvsrud]

Hello,

I'm currently working with a authentication / file storage setup for a
highschool (small one, about 150 students). 

LDAP works pretty well so far, but NFS is the current problem. 
I export a filesystem from a P3 1400 MHz / 512MB / 73GB SCSI server
running Debian 3.1 (Stable). I export it with a /etc/exports file 
looking like this:

/heim1     192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

(I'm aware that no_root_squash is a security problem, but this is not a
production system, I'm just testing).

The clients then mount it on /heim. 
(tor.intern.vagaungdomsskule.no:/heim1    /heim  nfs
rsize=4096,wsize=4096,rw,suid,dev,auto,nouser,sync    0       0)

The problem is: When I mount the filesystem from my workstation running
Ubuntu Breezy (with the fstab entry above) I get very poor performance. 
I perform a very simple test in a directory on the nfs mounted
filesystem from my workstation:

time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=16k count=1000
64+0 records in
63+0 records out
1032192 bytes transferred in 6,086174 seconds (169596 bytes/sec)

real    0m6.140s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.014s

Something is clearly wrong. When I mount the same nfs exported filsystem
on a testserver running Debian 3.1 I get much better performance
(somewhere around 10MB/Sec, which is a good starting point).

In the log of the server (/etc/syslog) I get some messages like this
(192.168.1.60 is the Workstation running Ubuntu):

Apr 25 11:49:30 localhost kernel: lockd: cannot monitor 192.168.1.60
Apr 25 11:49:30 localhost kernel: nsm_mon_unmon: rpc failed, status=-13
Apr 25 11:49:30 localhost kernel: lockd: cannot monitor 192.168.1.60
Apr 25 11:49:31 localhost kernel: nsm_mon_unmon: rpc failed, status=-13
Apr 25 11:49:31 localhost kernel: lockd: cannot monitor 192.168.1.60
Apr 25 11:49:31 localhost kernel: nsm_mon_unmon: rpc failed, status=-13
Apr 25 11:49:31 localhost kernel: lockd: cannot monitor 192.168.1.60
Apr 25 11:49:32 localhost kernel: nsm_mon_unmon: rpc failed, status=-13
Apr 25 11:49:32 localhost kernel: lockd: cannot monitor 192.168.1.60

I suspect this have something to do with the poor performance. Som
googling suggested that lockd was not running on the client, but it
seems to do. I also added NEED_LOCKD=yes in /etc/default/nfs-common just
in case. 


I appreciate any suggestions!

Erling Ringen Elvsrud