Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine was experiencing NFS hang. If you try to use df or look at a file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the shell) will hang too. So you want to be able to detect this without risking the detection process getting stuck too. It has not been obvious how to do this. When the hang has lasted a while, it is possible to find messages like these in dmesg:
nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
nfs: server nfsserver OK
It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to be sure looking in dmesg is going to work. If there are lots of other messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they are noticed.
While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect it. The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg. And after digging a bit further, I discovered that this value show up in /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.
The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine. I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem view), but that does not worry me.
The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:
[...]
device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
opts: rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
age: 7863311
caps: caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
sec: flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
bytes: 166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
RPC iostats version: 1.0 p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
xprt: tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
per-op statistics
NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
[...]
The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list. It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system operation. Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts. If these numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS hang. Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right away. The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a while. The exact timeout value depend on the setup. For example the defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS mount options.
The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
But according to
Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is experiencing NFS hangs? Is there a way to detect which processes are affected? Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared? I would very much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.