[OpenAFS] Local performance

[Dmitri Bichko]

Hello all,

I've just finished installing an openafs server and a couple of clients,
and I really quite like it.  However, one area that is really quite
disappointing is the local performance, ie reading from a volume on the
same server that it's stored on.

One use I've envisioned for AFS is the distribution of (rather large)
database files to several compute machines.  The idea being that he
databases are downloaded and built on one machine and then just pushed
out via ro replicas to the rest.

Unfortunately, I've noticed that sequentially reading a ~.6GB file from
a locally stored volume is almost 1/10 the speed of reading the same
file from a regular filesystem on the same machine.

Is this to be expected?  I assumed that it would be somewhat slower, but
didn't expect such a large hit.
Or is something broken with my setup?

Thanks,
Dmitri