Exercise 12.11
How does the NFS Automouter help to improve the performance and scalability of NFS ?
Answer :
The NFS mount service operates at system boot time or user login time at each workstation, mounting filesystems wholesale in case they will be used during the login session. This was found too cumbersome for some applications and produces large numbers of unused entries in mount tables. With the Automounter filesystems need not be mounted until they are accessed. This reduces the size of mount tables (and hence the time to search them). A simple form of filesystem replication for read-only filesystems can also be achieved with the Automounter, enabling the load of accesses to frequently-used system files to be shared between several NFS servers.
