This setup gives a sustained call rate in excess of 60000 calls/sec before being CPU-bound on the server. The server was running 128 nfsds. Profiling showed schedule() taking 6.7% of every CPU, and __wake_up() taking 5.2%. This patch drops those contributions to 3.0% and 2.2%. Load average was over 120 before the patch, and 20.9 after. This patch is a forward-ported version of knfsd-avoid-nfsd-overload which has been shipping in the SGI "Enhanced NFS" product since 2006. It has been posted before: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.nfs/10374 Signed-off-by: Greg Banks Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields