samba - Jun 1998 - Samba performance and sizeing

We are moving from a PCNFS client to SMB client environment and hence moving 
from NFS for our Sun fileservers to Samba.  I have seen figures indicating 
Samba is as good NT for SMB service.  However what we are concerned with is:

a) relative performance of Samba vs  Sun's NFS

b) loading on servers with lots of active connections (and hence lots of 
smbds).  Do you need more memory than with comparable NFS set up?
Do you need more processing power?

Any pointers to results or hints gratefully received.

I realise things are complicated by the ever increasing power of the clients 
(ie moving from mixed 486/pentium Win 3.1 to pentium NT client base).

Currently our home directory servers are typically: Ultra 1s with 100Mb ether 
and 128Mb and several hundred users.
Software servers are similar and typically support upto 30 classroom and upto 
200 office clients.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
| Peter.Polkinghorne@brunel.ac.uk   +44 1895 274000 x2561       UK          |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Firstly thanks for those who replied to my request.

Responses have suggested:

Samba would use less resources that NFS.

Samba would use more memory, but equivalent processing power.

This broadly fits in with my impression that the protocol is not radically 
different in efficiency from NFS, data still has to fetched & writen to
discs,
and the main difference is that (for Suns) the NFS stuff is in kernel threads, 
while Samba has per connection user process.

One of my colleagues did some measurements and what was seen was as follows:

Solaris 2.5.1 Sparc server, Samba 1.9.18p3 server and clients.

Each connection used ~ 1.7Mb of memory.

This implies if we expect lots of connections that are reasonably active (ie 
deadtime will not remove), then extra memeory for servers is required.  
Luckily this is not expensive these days :-).

Otherwise nothing remarkable on performance measurements.  Guess we could 
publish more detailed figures if there is interest.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
| Peter.Polkinghorne@brunel.ac.uk   +44 1895 274000 x2561       UK          |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------