kontact & NFS mounted home directories?

[ITSEF Admin]

Hi all,

again, I'm after the experience of other Kolab users/admins... :-} At our 
company, we're using NFS mounted home directories. The file server is quite 
weak at the moment (3GHz P4 with a single ATA-100 drive) - it was sufficient 
for the first 10 users with Linux here, but went completely to its knees as 
soon as we started rolling out kontact/Kolab 2.0.3. Hence, the need for a 
"proper" implementation. Which is why I'd be very interested to hear from 
people who are using kontact in conjunction with NFS mounted home 
directories: What kind of file server do you use? Some RAID based setup? What 
is your experience wrt. performance?

Our simple setup got so slow that I was forced to come up with some 
construction that stores ~/.kde/share/config and 
~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap on a local drive in each workstation[0]. 
Performance now is good, but this setup is fragile and needs a lot of extra 
scripting to keep the KDE config in good shape, especially, if users log in 
on another workstation. Hence the desire to get the file server right and 
abandon this workaround. As usual: Any hint is welcome - and thanks in 
advance!

Regards,

Thomas

[0] strace revealed that kontact is absolutely pounding those two directories 
during a sync with the server - I can understand the dimap directory, but I 
also saw lots of accesses (read and write) to miscellaneous files in config 
(kmailrc and kdeglobals, most notably). See also earlier mails from me to 
this list...