On Mon, 03 Nov 2014 21:00:13 +0200, Kevin Wilson said:
The strong server, on which I intend to build, has about 4 time more CPU power than the NFS server.
Actually, CPU doesn't matter as much as I/O capability. You don't believe me, try building a kernel with a cache-cold source tree, and again with a cache-hot tree. A long time ago in a $DAYJOB far far away, I was the admin for a small cluster of Sun-3 workstations. A Sun-3/50 had a whole whopping 4M of RAM, and an optional attachment for a very slow "shoebox" disk drive. It was actually faster to put the swap space on a file on the NFS server (a Sun 3/280 with 16M of memory and Fujitsu Super-Eagle disk drives) and swap across the 10mbit ethernet than to the local drive.
The question is - does it worth it ? or building by NFS is too much expensive because of the overhead ?
Depends on your network and the NFS server, and the disk system that the NFS server uses as a back end. My NFS servers usually have a 10G ethernet card, and expensive high-end disk systems(*) with several hundred disks to stripe RAID across. Usually pretty hard for a system that has a commodity local hard drive to compete with that sort of thing. Only way to tell for sure is to actually try it. (*) Stuff like the DDN SFA12K http://www.ddn.com/products/storage-platform-sfa12kx/ or the NetApp E-series http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/e5400/e5400-product-compar...