Hey everyone,
I just noticed something weird that changed on my system without me doing anything, and for once this is a positive change.
I have a rather beefy custom all in one server, which among other things serves as my NAS box using storage on ZFS. Since 2014 I had it direct linked to my workstation with 10gig fiber networking, but a few years ago I got a ridiculously good deal on a couple of 40-gig Intel NIC’s, so despite the 40Gig standard being at the end of the road, I decided to go for it.
My workstation mounts the folders on my server using NFS over a dedicated direct link on a secondary subnet.
Because I had more network bandwidth than I ever needed, I often when copying files around just drag and drop them on my Linux Mint workstation in Nemo. I mean, why SSH in and use cp or mv commands if you don’t have to?
So, the other day, I needed to duplicate a large disk volume, so I just dragged and dropped it in Nemo on my workstation as I usually do.
In the past, I would be able to see network activity in the system monitor, with high bandwidth traffic coming in to my workstation, and then turning around and going back tot he server again. But this time? Nothing. I saw no traffic at all on the network interface. I originally noticed this because I wasn’t seeing any estimate of transfer speeds or completion times in Nemo, like I usually do. (It actually looked as if something was wrong and the file transfer was frozen) so I went to investigate. But after a while (it was a very large file) the copy process completed, and the copied file showed up where it was supposed to be, with no network activity at all…
At first I thought maybe the System Monitor was broken, and no longer measuring traffic on my second NIC, but that wasnt the case at all. When I copied a file from the server to my workstation (or vice versa) the traffic showed up as usual.
So, it looks like something has changed in NFS. My conclusion is that it is now able to intelligently tell when a copy directed by a remote machine is doing disk operations on the local machine, and just do it all locally without transferring the network file across the network and back again.
I don’t know exactly when this changed. It didn’t do this back when I first up[graded to Mint 22, but it seems to have started doing it before I upgraded to 22.1 (last Sunday)
I have to say, this is a pretty cool improvement to NFS.
Does anyone know when it happened, and where I might be able to read more about it? I am curious how it works.
It is rare for a positive improvement like this, and I am thrilled. Only downside here is that Nemo can no longer estimate transfer speeds and/or completion times, as the data no longer transits my workstation in flight.
Appreciate any input anyone might have.