Hi Daniel,

If you're pointing to a folder (be it a symlink or not) on your OS X server for information that actually resides on a NAS device the traffic will go through the OS X Server. The end device doesn't know about the symlink on the server, it only knows to look there for the information it requires.

Cheers, Andrina

On 2010-05-12, at 4:32 AM, Daniel Roizman wrote:

I need to spread some folders over multiple servers. Some servers are OSX, some are NAS. OSX doesn't handle UNC paths natively. If I mount the NAS on my OSX server and create symlinks in a folder to the NAS, does traffic to/from the NAS end up going through the OSX server on which the link lives or will it talk directly to the other server?

thanks

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It might be worth clarifying.

so there is an i/o penalty on the osx server, but the actual transfer will come directly from the NAS through the switch to your box?

Until you are hitting it with a few 1000 cores (perhaps more), the load is very small on the osx server. One funny thing (or perhaps not so funny) that we have recently seen is that there are advantages to keep the depth of the paths short in terms of # of directories, since NFS will need to do a get-attribute lookup for each directory level to make sure that you have the access rights. So the shallower the depth the better.