26 engineers on Hacker News describe using NFS first-hand: 5 endorse it, 10 regret it, 2 are mixed.
“While using NFS with the Thumpers and then Thors (X4540) was fantastic”
endorse · production · neomantra · 2025-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So we build nothing, pay nothing, get POSIX semantics back, and speed has gone up 3x.”
endorse · production · dismantlethesun · 2025-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The only counterexample involved a buggy RHEL-backported NFS client that liked to deadlock, and that couldn't be upgraded for… reasons.”
regret · production · hedora · 2025-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SMB is more resilient to network interrupts than NFS which just hangs the client indefinitely.”
regret · personal · gosub100 · 2023-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've worked somewhere with a lot of NFS, and they had centralized account management, so everything was fine other than actual security”
mixed · production · toast0 · 2022-06-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“NFS is simpler and easier to manage.”
endorse · production · xupybd · 2021-08-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have spent hundreds of hours, over the course of ~3 years, tweaking and tuning an NFS server on a RPi4”
regret · personal · 3 yr · scubbo · 2020-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Once you get 20+ NFS users, you just better focus on your real company product rather spend month and money on maintaining NFS yourself.”
regret · production · Galanwe · 2020-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've found that NFS is actually a lot faster for a lot of things. ... I would be happy to use it in production, and have recommended it”
endorse · production · lazyier · 2020-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We can reliably reproduce an NFS mount dropping off the network around the 12th GB of a large file”
regret · production · OldHand2018 · 2019-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“saw 90x better perf for filesystem-heavy loads like Webpack once we switched off of NFS in our local VMs.”
regret · production · jitl · 2019-02-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“NFS runs really well as a native format to share between guest and host.”
endorse · personal · wolfspider · 2018-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Eventually, NFS ends up freaking out and consumes all I/O on the client machine until it is rebooted.”
regret · production · leesalminen · 2017-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“NFS is about the same, even worse when trying to serve to windows clients.”
regret · production · arca_vorago · 2017-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's not my favourite setup, but it's worked well-enough this past week that I haven't had to manually correct things”
mixed · production · HorizonXP · 2014-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've built a few such configurations myself, but never again. The worst behavior is that sometimes, the NFS caches result in compiling old versions”
regret · production · tlb · 2014-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've had a surprising amount of difficulty maintaining this over the years, since FreeBSD's NFSv4 implementation kind of sucked for a while”
regret · production · moot · 2013-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“setup a few terabytes of NFS to automatically provision storage”
neutral · production · acoard · 2020-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At my workplace we run VMware over NFS served by Netapp clusters.”
neutral · production · chousuke · 2019-05-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Integration with existing storage (we use NetApp Solidfire and NFS)”
neutral · production · dsnuh · 2018-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“oss - NFS server providing storage for OpenShift docker images (CentOS 7)”
neutral · production · snuxoll · 2016-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I did this to torture test a small cluster and its NFS server and its network and disk IO a long while back.”
neutral · personal · VLM · 2013-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've also completely abandoned EBS in favor of ephemeral storage except in two places: some NFS and MySQL slaves”
neutral · production · blantonl · 2012-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our Web infrastructure off an NFS cluster which has all storage on an EBS volume. We take snapshots from that.”
neutral · production · blantonl · 2011-05-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?