Previously on MFMH:

 * Our hero added incremental kernel export updates to mountd so
   that a single update would finish within his lifetime,

 * Hero subsequently discovers that an incremental update still
   takes 8 seconds on the Emulab Mothership,

 * Hero discovers that remaining time is spent NOT in kernel operations
   or even complex calculations of orbital mechanics, but rather in simple
   parsing of text from a 1300 line file.

 * Hero gives up in despair.

This week on MFMH:

 * Our revitalized hero applies gprof-fu to the problem and
   discovers that 7.9 seconds of the 8 second /etc/exports parse time
   is spent stat()ing /etc/nsswitch.conf 2,392,057 times.

 * "WtF!", exclaims our hero, "that is 27.3 stats for every text
   character in the file!"

 * Problem is traced to the fact that we do "-maproot=root" for each
   of the 1344 exports and every parse of that option looks up root
   in the password file and determines which of the 1784 groups in
   /etc/group root belongs to. Each of those 1344 * 1784 "get group
   entry" calls, stats /etc/nsswitch.conf to see if the file has
   changed.

 * "Bite me!", sez Mike, and he adds a CACHE_ROOT_CREDS option to
   mountd so that the lookup is only done on the very first instance
   of -maproot=root.

A single incremental update of exports now takes 0.75 seconds.