NFS Gateway for NetWare 6.5 - NetWare Server "hangs," i.e. volumes stop responding

A server running NetWare 6.5 SP5 (or later) and NFS Gateway, under a heavy load, may occasionally stop responding to some types of requests. This typically manifests itself on NCP clients when drives mapped to NFS Gateway volumes no longer respond, and eventually time-out.

 

Operations performed at the server console which would need to access the NFS Gateway volume typically stop responding as well.

 

In some cases, activity with other NSS volumes on the server is lost as well.

The cause of this behavior is undetermined. In some cases, boosting memory devoted to NFS Gateway and Btrieve has been helpful. The configuration locations are:

 

1.  SYS:SYSTEM\BTI.CFG

CacheSize n

 

Boost 'n' to a generous amount of RAM. This setting is in Kbytes. Recommendation, at least: 262144 (256 MBytes). In theory this can be boosted even higher, depending on system resources.

 

2.  SYS:\SYSTEM\GYSTART.NCF

nfsgy -shadowCacheSize x -pageCacheSize y

 

Boost x to 32 (MBytes).

Boost y to a generous amount of RAM. This setting is in Mbytes. Recommendation: at least 256.

keywords hang hanging hung