Interesting!

Since you are getting (relatively) high i/o wait states, that means you likely have enough nfs daemons on the server to process client requests, but nfs server is just too slow to process the client's i/o and it gets backed up.

You mention editing/compiling fortran programs; presumably small ones, so that isn't going to do much on the home directories.

Firefox, however, can be brutal.  Move the whole profile (copy+symlink is easiest), or maybe start with just moving the cache to the local workstation's disk (/var/tmp/?) or /dev/shm/firefox-$USER to keep it disposable.  The cache directory can be set in firefox under the URL about:config  -- search for "cache" and note the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory option.

Good luck!

PS - the "c" command in "top" will show the whole process name, not just a snippet.


On 11/29/2012 01:49 PM, David Fitzgerald wrote:

> I also ran pstree and I will put that output below, but I think I may be barking up the wrong tree.  While some of my clients were freezing up, I saw that my NFS server was getting very high 'top' loads.  Fortunately I  have sysstat running on the server and after class 'sar -u' showed that %iowait went from less than 1 before class to a high of 53 after class began, and stayed high until class ended.  Here is the relevant 'chunk' of the sar -u  output:
>
> 05:20:01 PM     all      0.03      0.00      0.07      0.17      0.00     99.73
> 05:30:01 PM     all      0.03      0.00      0.03      0.11      0.00     99.83
> 05:40:01 PM     all      0.18      0.00      0.50      1.88      0.00     97.44
> 05:50:01 PM     all      0.16      0.00      1.12      6.93      0.00     91.78
> 06:00:01 PM     all      0.73      0.00      5.23     32.61      0.00     61.43
> 06:10:01 PM     all      0.77      0.00      6.55     53.67      0.00     39.01
> 06:20:01 PM     all      0.13      0.00      4.81     27.81      0.00     67.25
> 06:30:01 PM     all      0.13      0.00      6.69     21.71      0.00     71.47
> 06:40:01 PM     all      0.11      0.00      3.47     33.34      0.00     63.08
> 06:50:01 PM     all      0.11      0.00      3.20     31.02      0.00     65.67
> 07:00:01 PM     all      0.24      0.00      3.93     30.79      0.00     65.05
> 07:10:01 PM     all      0.16      0.00      3.63     20.51      0.00     75.71
> 07:20:01 PM     all      0.18      0.00      5.23      1.45      0.00     93.13
> 07:30:01 PM     all      0.10      0.00      5.72      0.70      0.00     93.48
> Average:        all      0.06      0.01      0.46      2.13      0.00     97.34
>
>
>   The NFS server is a virtual machine in running ESXI 4.1 and VMware tools IS installed.  Could this be slow disk access, and thus a VMware misconfiguration?  I hate to admit it, but I am at a loss.
>