OK, I read the Olaf Kirch article, and the "NFS Sucks" title is mostly clickbait. There are indeed a bunch of shortcomings in NFS that he points out, that are partially addressed by NFSv4. He also admits that (as of 2006) there isn't anything better.
Locking has historically always been a problem in NFS. Kirch mentions that NLM was designed for Posix semantics only. I frankly don't know if NLM is related to `rpc.lockd` which appeared in SunOS 4 and possibly even SunOS 3 (mid 1980s at this point) which well predates anything having to do with Posix. Part of the problem is the confused state of file locking in the Unix world, even for local files. There was BSD-style `flock` and SYSV-style `lockf` and there might even have been multiple versions of those. Implementing these in a distributed system would have been terribly complex. Even at Sun, at least through the mid 1990s, the conventional wisdom was to avoid file locking. If you really needed something that supported distributed updates, it was better to use a purpose-built network protocol.
One thing "willy" got right in his comment is that NFS is an example of "worse is better". In its early version, it had the benefit of being relatively simple, as acknowledged in the LWN article. This made it easy to port and reimplement and thus it became widespread.
Of course being simple means there are lots of tradeoffs and shortcomings. To address these you need to make things more complex, and now things are "ridiculous" and "bloated". Oh well.
The funny thing is that we're running our large NFS servers on OmniOS (with Linux NFS clients), as plugins for a certain large PHP-based blogging platform loves to sprinkle LOCK_EX flocks all over the place.
Sadly with a Linux NFS server, lock state eventually corrupts itself to extinction but OmniOS can tick along past 300 days uptime without a problem.
Of course.... these issues only show up under production levels of load, and have never been able to be distilled into a reproducable test case.
Locking has historically always been a problem in NFS. Kirch mentions that NLM was designed for Posix semantics only. I frankly don't know if NLM is related to `rpc.lockd` which appeared in SunOS 4 and possibly even SunOS 3 (mid 1980s at this point) which well predates anything having to do with Posix. Part of the problem is the confused state of file locking in the Unix world, even for local files. There was BSD-style `flock` and SYSV-style `lockf` and there might even have been multiple versions of those. Implementing these in a distributed system would have been terribly complex. Even at Sun, at least through the mid 1990s, the conventional wisdom was to avoid file locking. If you really needed something that supported distributed updates, it was better to use a purpose-built network protocol.
One thing "willy" got right in his comment is that NFS is an example of "worse is better". In its early version, it had the benefit of being relatively simple, as acknowledged in the LWN article. This made it easy to port and reimplement and thus it became widespread.
Of course being simple means there are lots of tradeoffs and shortcomings. To address these you need to make things more complex, and now things are "ridiculous" and "bloated". Oh well.