When clients access storage systems over a high-latency network, such as a wide area network (WAN) or metro area network (MAN) with a latency over 10 milliseconds, you might be able to improve the connection performance by modifying the TCP maximum transfer size. Clients accessing storage systems in a low-latency network, such as a local area network (LAN), can expect little to no benefit from modifying these parameters. If the throughput improvement does not outweigh the latency impact, you should not use these parameters.

To determine whether your storage environment would benefit from modifying these parameters, you should first conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation of a poorly performing NFS client. Review whether the low performance is because of excessive round trip latency and small request on the client. Under these conditions, the client and server cannot fully use the available bandwidth because they spend the majority of their duty cycles waiting for small requests and responses to be transmitted over the connection.

By increasing the NFSv3 and NFSv4 request size, the client and server can use the available bandwidth more effectively to move more data per unit time; therefore, increasing the overall efficiency of the connection.

Keep in mind that the configuration between the storage system and the client might vary. The storage system and the client supports maximum size of 1 MB for transfer operations. However, if you configure the storage system to support 1 MB maximum transfer size but the client only supports 64 KB, then the mount transfer size is limited to 64 KB or less.

Before modifying these parameters, you must be aware that it results in additional memory consumption on the storage system for the period of time necessary to assemble and transmit a large response. The more high-latency connections to the storage system, the higher the additional memory consumption. Storage systems with high memory capacity might experience very little effect from this change. Storage systems with low memory capacity might experience noticeable performance degradation.

The successful use of these parameter relies on the ability to retrieve data from multiple nodes of a cluster. The inherent latency of the cluster network might increase the overall latency of the response. Overall latency tends to increase when using these parameters. As a result, latency sensitive workloads might show negative impact.