I need to do a project for a college course to analyze the performance of a large NFS system. Of course I personally don't have a large number of servers so I can simulate this with real hardware. Are there any software NFS simulators, or something similiar, that I could use to evaluate NFS peformance at different workloads and parameters?

Try one of these tools listed on this site. http://wiki.linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Testing_tools Here is another good reference. http://http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-HOWTO/performance.html

Thanks for your reply. Several of those files are not relevant to NFS and the others require you to have an NFS system in place. Unfortunatly, I only one computer and do not have the resource to setup more than one computer to simulate a network. I see dbench doesn't require clients but will that still use the nfsd thread and be affected by the amount of threads I have allocated? Do you have any other ideas? Did I miss something in what you posted earlier?

Update. I have another quick question. As part of my testing I am only supposed to focus on evaluating the performance impact of adjusting the NFS threads and different harddrive rotating speeds. I don't know if that helps any or not.

Thanks again.

Then only other suggestion I have would be to use vmware or virtualbox and setup a vm with your favourite distro of linux. Then use one of those commands listed.

Course I really have not done too much with NFS benchmarking.

Thanks for the suggestion. What did you mean when you wrote "Then use one of those commands listed?" Commands for what?