Benchmark results.

Jeremy Allison
Mon, 01 Feb 1999 19:42:11 -0000

Hi all,

	For people who are looking for some objective
numbers to help recommend Samba to their employers (I
know there are some of you on this list :-) you might
want to look at the following couple of articles.

The first one is in Smart Reseller (a USA trade press
magazine) at :

http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,2196106,00.html

titled : "The Best Windows File Server: Linux!".

It covers Samba on Linux vs. NT on a single processor
system (and confirms the rumours I've heard that Linux
+ Samba outperform NT with more than 12 users).

The second becnhmark I must confess I helped with.
This was done at PC Week (another USA trade press
magazine) and was in a large server configuration.

This was a VA Research 4 x 450MHz Xeon processor
machine, with 18GB of storage in a RAID 5 configuration
and 2GB of memory.

This article may be found at :

http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,387766,00.html

titled: "Linux: Enterprise-ready".

There are no comparitive NT numbers in this benchmark.

The reason for that is that NT on the multiprocessor box performed
so poorly in the test (a factor of 5 slower than Samba) that
both PC Week and myself were convinced that something was wrong
with the NT tuning.

The problem was that NT refused to use more that 300MB
of memory for file cache (despite tweaking the only
public setting that NT allows to modify this). Even
searchin all Microsoft technical references and Web
pages on NT tuning did not allow us to find anything
to force NT to use more memory for disk cache.

On the Linux side I used to documentation in
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/vm

to set the disk cache size to 80% of all available
memory.

Hope these numbers are interesting to people - use
them as you will :-) :-).

Regards,

	Jeremy Allison,
	Samba Team.

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