Re: Multiple clients accessing git over NFS

From: Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>
Date: Nov 14, 2010, 23:11 UTC
Message-ID: <rmi39r3mrf6.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimyFkVFAw4s2fiWKZFPvnx15K6U6GbxmRgznx7Z@mail.gmail.com>

Khawaja Shams <kshams@usc.edu> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Is it a recommended practice to share a repository over NFS, where
> multiple clients can be pushing changes simultaneously?  In our
> production environment, we have a Git repository setup behind
> git-http-backend. We would like to place multiple Apache servers
> behind a load balancer to maximize availability and performance.
> Before we proceed, we wanted to check to see if this practice has a
> potential to cause repository corruption. If there are other ways
> others have solved this problem, we would be very interested in
> learning about those as well. Thank you.

NFS locking has historically been problematic, and my impression is that most people avoid it. Perhaps it's ok on Solaris, but without serious testing, I'd be worried.

Can you explain what you have set up, and what your performance situation is, and why you think adding a second or third apache over NFS will help? How many users? How many pushes/day?

One option is to have a multi-core box with tons of RAM running apache; I've done that for trac (8 core, 16G, RAID5) because trac/python is so piggy, and buying a $3K box was cheaper than making trac go faster. That doesn't get you into remote FS locking issues.