Performance Samba 2.0.6 / FreeBSD 3.4 vs NT and NetWare

[Petr Sulla]

> Samba however is consistently slower than both, and its "write" time is much
> slower, and quite inconsistent. I was hoping Samba/FreeBSD would be at least
> as fast as the NetWare box (which I'm considering replacing w/ the Samba
> Box), given that it's running on faster processor w/ more ram.

I have the same experience on my P3/500 server with RH6.1 on a 100Mbit network. 
Samba was very slow at writing from a Win98 client, no matter what I tuned. 
Reading was 7MB/s, that is fine, writing was varying from 5 to 2 MB/s and that is
too slow for me (and my boss). But I got this writing speed for every of 
simultaneous connections on one client, up to the 100Mbit bandwith. So it is 
definitely not a Linux's problem.

FTP was both writing and reading 8MB/s, and what is interesting: so was 
Samba to Samba ! So I think there could be a problem how Samba handles the Win98
Microsoft's implementation of SMB.

Well, it's really hard to persuade your boss to install Linux&Samba, when
it's 60% slower than NT. I had to install (hopefully) temporarily W2K on that
server and I'll wait for faster Samba ;-), coz W2K and NT is a PAIN (slow 
software RAID5, no good free backuping software, no low bandwith remote
control, huge memory requirements etc etc.)

Yours sincerely
		Petr Sulla