Benchmark results.

Dave Lawson
Wed, 03 Feb 1999 13:01:57 -0000

Jeremy Allison wrote in samba SAMBA digest number 1966:

	> 	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).

For those interested in what the test was run on:

>From the accompanying sidebar at:
	http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,387506,00.html
How We Tested
Our test platform was a pair of identically configured and outfitted 266MHz
PCs. Each had 64MB of memory and a 4GB IDE disk drive. An Intel Corp.
EtherExpress Pro 100B network interface card connected the server to our
client network, which is driven by a pair of Synoptics (now Nortel Networks)
28115 Fast Ethernet switches. All tests ran at a network speed of 100Mbps.
In each instance, we performed a fresh install of the operating system. We
let the operating system decide the default disk configuration in each case.
In other words, we didn't try to tweak any settings. (Our guess is that
results would have been even more embarrassing if we had.)

We measured the throughput of up to 30 clients for each server. The clients
were
a mix of 166MHz, 200MHz and 233MHz machines running Windows 95. Each of the
clients ran the WebBench 2.0 static test workload to measure http server
performance and NetBench 5.01 for Server Message Block (SMB), or file
service, testing. Both benchmarks are available free from www.zdbop.com.

We configured each of the Linux boxes to run Samba (the SMB server) and
Apache
(the Web server)--but that's it. We weren't running DNS or Sendmail.
Since
they were being evaluated as servers, the Linux boxes were not running the X
display system. The NT box was running Internet Information Server 4.0 under
NT 4.0 with Service Pack 4. Again, no additional services were running.

According to ZDLabs' results (see test charts), each of the commercial Linux
releases ate NT's lunch. Our tests also revealed that Apache for OpenLinux
is superior to Apache for Red Hat and SuSE. Moreover, Samba for Red Hat
scales better than its counterparts.

Dave Lawson
Unix System Admin
Menasco Aerospace
Oakville, Ontario