Hi Tim,
Just as a sanity check.....
I did some testing earlier this year to characterize performance
differences btw 2.2.8a and 3.0.2a. I tested simple copies of one .5 GB
file, and also a directory with 5000 files (with very long names
including upper and lower case). As long as I was testing the version
deltas, I also compared the tests to a Windows 2003 Server.
I do not want to specify the exact results and hardware (since I work
for a vendor), but for the single-big-file test Windows 2003 ftp was
slower than Samba by a factor of 3. ftp on HP-UX was just slightly
faster than Samba. For the 5000-files test, reading from the server was
about the same for all SMB server platforms (XP from W2003, 2.2.8a,
3.0.2a). For the 5000-files test, writing to the server was
significantly slower on Samba versus Windows. This is well-known
behavior for large directories due to name mangling and case sensitivity.
I also tested extensively versus NFS (but this was on 2.0.6 - quite a
while ago) and the total throughput numbers (MB/s) were almost the same
for SMB vs NFS. These were 8-way 4-GbE boxes, though.
I cannot claim these results as "benchmarks" - maybe someday if we get
a
CIFS benchmark like SPEC then we'll have a level playing field. The
point is, that results vary all over the place by environment. (also -
turn off strict locking and test again).
Go Mustangs! (c/o '80 & '88)
Eric Roseme
Hewlett-Packard
Tim Harvey wrote:
> I'm doing some performance tests on a samba NAS server and I've
found some
> interesting statistics:
>
> I'm doing my performance tests in linux using:
> # time dd if=somelargefileovershare of=/dev/null bs=1M count=100
> Then calculating the bandwidth
>
> For windows I'm low-tech: stopwatch plus drag-n-drop of a large file
(any
> recommendations on a 'simple' windows program that will tell you
how long it
> took to copy a file, or even calc the BW for you?)
>
> Here are my bandwidth results:
>
> nfs via linux: 10MB/s
> smb via linux: 5MB/s
> smb via win: 8MB/s
>
> Questions:
> - why would I be getting half the performance via nfs vs smb? Is there a
> lot more overhead with smb vs nfs?
> - why the large difference between using smb from a linux box vs smb from
> windows? The windows transfers are much faster... almost 2X
>
> I'm just trying to understand my results better. The samba server
I'm
> mounting to is running on a 1.2GHz Celeron, 256MB SDRAM, using a raid5
array
> with an XFS filesystem on ATA drives with a 100mbps nic. The bottleneck
> here is the 100mbps nic, which theoretically will give me a max throughput
> from the server of 12.5MB/sec, so I'm fairly satisfied to see 10MB/sec
from
> the nfs test.
>
> Thanks for any assistance in understanding these results,
>
> Tim
>