NFS Server RPCs Test

This test reports the statistical information about the Connection and Connectionless RPC calls received by an NFS server. This test is applicable to Solaris OS only.

Target of the test : NFS on Solaris server

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results each for connection and connectionless RPC calls.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameter	Description
Test period	How often should the test be executed
Host	The host for which the test is to be configured.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Total number of calls	The total number of RPC calls received by the server during the last measurement period.	Number	This metric is a measure of the server workload.
Number of badcalls	The total number of calls rejected by the RPC layer (the sum of badlen and xdrcall as defined below) during the last measurement period.	Number	Ideally, there should be very few bad calls. If there are any bad calls, possible reasons could be authentication problems caused by having a user in too many groups, attempts to access exported file systems as the root user, or an improper secure RPC configuration.
Number of nullrecv	The number of times an RPC call was not available when it was thought to be received.	Number	Too many null receipts can indicate that NFS requests are not arriving fast enough to keep all nfsd daemons busy. Consider reducing the number of NFS server daemons until null receipts are reported.
Number of badlen	The number of RPC calls in the last measurement period with a length shorter than a minimum-sized RPC request (i.e. corrupt RPC requests).	Number	This metric indicates malformed NFS requests that can be caused by bugs in the client or server software of by physical network problems.
Number of xdrcall	The number of RPC calls in the last measurement period whose header could not be XDR decoded.	Number	This metric indicates malformed NFS requests that can be caused by bugs in the client or server software or by physical network problems.
Number of dupchecks	The number of RPC calls in the last measurement period that looked up in the duplicate request cache.	Number	The duplicate request cache keeps a record of previously executed NFS requests. The dupchecks value reports the number of times this cache was consulted or checked.
Number of dupreqs	The number of RPC calls in the last measurement period that were found to be duplicates.	Number	The dupreqs count indicates the number of times a check of the duplicate request cache had a “hit” – i.e. the number of times the NFS server received a previously executed request. For connection-oriented requests, a high dupreqs to dupchecks ratio is 0.01%. For connectionless requests, a high ratio of dupreqs to dupchecks is 1%. High ratios indicate one of three problems: The timeout set on one or more clients' NFS mounts is too low: Adjust the timeo option in the automounter map or the NFS mount command upward. The server is not responding quickly enough: There could be lots of reasons for this having to do with physical capabilities of the server, such as, processor speed, numbers of processors (if it is a multiprocessor), not enough primary memory (check if the percentage of reads is high, say over 5%; this would indicate lots of reads that would be best served from cache if there was enough memory), numbers of disk drives on the system (spreading more data accesses across more spindles reduces response time; if you've eliminated primary memory as a cause, check if the percentage of writes is high, say over 5%), etc. Other possibilities extend to artificial limits, such as the number of server threads set via nfsd. There is a routing problem impeding replies from the server to one or more clients.