Is NFSv4.1 Ready for Prime Time?

NFSv4.1, the latest version of the NFS protocol, has improvements in correctness, security, maintainability, scalability, and cross-OS interoperability. To help system administrators decide whether or not to adopt NFSv4.1 in production systems, we conducted a comprehensive performance comparison between NFSv3 and NFSv4.1 on Linux. We found NFSv4.1 to be stable and its performance to be comparable to NFSv3. Our new (and sometimes surprising) observations and analysis cast light on the dark alleys of NFS performance on Linux.