I've been trying to understand exactly how timeouts work in the NFS
client and find that the man page in nfs-utils is not correct.
In particular, the implementation differentiates between TCP and UDP,
while the man page does not make that distinction.
I have attempted an update to the man page as you can see below. It
is entirely possible that I have not got it completely correct (or
comprehensible) so I'm asking for people to check that what I have
written is correct and clear.
This I would particularly like comment on:
1/ I have left
Better overall performance may be achieved by increasing the
timeout when mounting on a busy network, to a slow server, or through
several routers or gateways.
unchanged. Is it still a reasonable thing to say?
2/ I have moved the documentation about major timeouts into the retrans=
section. Does that break the description up too much?
3/ the old text seems to say that after the first major-timeout, a
slightly different sequence of timeouts are used. I couldn't find
evidence of this in the code. Did I miss something, or is my text
correct?
4/ Did this change in some ancient kernel version, and should the
version number of the change be documented? e.g. is it a 2.4 / 2.6
difference?
5/ As the behaviour is quite different for UDP and TCP, should we
introduce a major_timeo= option which calculates an appropriate
retrans= based on the actual timeo= and proto= used.
and anything else that occurs to anyone.
Thanks,
NeilBrown
diff --git a/utils/mount/nfs.man b/utils/mount/nfs.man
index d92da19..0142075 100644
--- a/utils/mount/nfs.man
+++ b/utils/mount/nfs.man
@@ -83,24 +83,50 @@ Note: Setting this size to a value less than the largest supported
block size will adversely affect performance.
.TP 1.5i
.I timeo=n
-The value in tenths of a second before sending the
-first retransmission after an RPC timeout.
-The default value is 7 tenths of a second. After the first timeout,
-the timeout is doubled after each successive timeout until a maximum
-timeout of 60 seconds is reached or the enough retransmissions
-have occured to cause a major timeout. Then, if the filesystem
-is hard mounted, each new timeout cascade restarts at twice the
-initial value of the previous cascade, again doubling at each
-retransmission. The maximum timeout is always 60 seconds.
+The value in tenths of a second for the first RPC timeout. If no
+reply has been received in this much time, the message is
+retransmitted.
+Further timeouts are handled differently depending on the connection
+type.
+
+For UDP (which is unreliable and lacks congestion control),
+each successive timeout is twice the previous timeout. As the default
+is 11 tenths of a seconds, the timeouts used if
+.I timeo=
+is not specified are 1.1, 2.2, 4.4, 8.8,... seconds. The timeout for
+each retransmission is limited to 60 seconds, so the next few numbers
+in the above sequence would be 17.6, 35.2, 60, 60.
+
+For reliable protocols such as TCP and RDMA, the successive timeouts
+grow linearly rather than exponentially to a maximum of 10 minutes.
+The default is 1 minute, so the default successive timeout are 1,
+2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10 minutes.
+
+It is unwise to set
+.I timeo=
+explicitly without also setting the protocol to use, as it has a
+significantly different effect depending on protocol.
+
Better overall performance may be achieved by increasing the
timeout when mounting on a busy network, to a slow server, or through
several routers or gateways.
.TP 1.5i
.I retrans=n
The number of minor timeouts and retransmissions that must occur before
-a major timeout occurs. The default is 3 timeouts. When a major timeout
-occurs, the file operation is either aborted or a "server not responding"
-message is printed on the console.
+a major timeout occurs. The default is 2 yielding a total of 3
+attempts (1 transmission and 2 retransmissions). When a major timeout
+occurs the behaviour depends on whether the filesystem was mounted
+.I hard
+or
+.IR soft .
+In the case of a
+.I soft
+mount, the operation will abort and typically return an IO error to
+the application. In the case of a
+.I hard
+mount a "server not responding" message will be printed on the
+console, and the request will be retried with the original series of
+timeouts.
.TP 1.5i
.I acregmin=n
The minimum time in seconds that attributes of a regular file should