samba - Jul 2002 - Samba Performance Questions (1 share for ALL user homes or 1 share PER user?)

Hello,

I am currently installing samba for a large site (over 350 users)
and I was interested in some SAMBA performance questions.

I have a large single file store on a single Unix (Solaris 7) system
that has multiple volumes for home directory storage that I want
to export via SMB shares to PC users. Each filesystem
contains over 300 home directories.

Is it more efficient (memory usage and performance) to create one
single SMB share per home directory filesystem or one share
per user directory.

eg.

if the filesystem is

   /export/home1

   which contains home dirs:
      jbloggs
      jsmith

Should I make one SMB share [homes1] for /export/home1
so users on PCs mount their home dir as

        \\server\homes1\jbloggs
        \\server\homes1\jsmith

or

Should I make one SMB share PER user
so users on PCs mount their home dir as

          \\server\jbloggs
          \\server\jsmith

Also,

    Are there any good Samba performance loading tools for SAMBA
    that I can use to get figures on measuring memory usage
    etc on the server side.

Thanks

--
Richard Frost - mailto:Richard.Frost@motorola.com
Senior Systems & Networks Engineer - Infomation Systems Group
Systems & Networks Department, Global Software Group, Motorola
Ph: +61 8 8168 3589 - Fax: +61 8 8168 3664