Drawbacks of a Stateless Service
The stateless nature of NFS has compelling design advantages (simplicity), but also some key drawbacks:
- Update operations are disk-limited because they must be committed synchronously at the server.
- NFS cannot (quite) preserve local single-copy semantics.
Files may be removed while they are open on the client.
Idempotent operations cannot capture full semantics of Unix FS.
- Retransmissions can lead to correctness problems and can quickly saturate an overloaded server.
- Server keeps no record of blocks held by clients, so cache consistency is problematic.