[jcifs] jCIFS throughput: what to expect?

[Laurent Millet]

Hello all,

This post is about performance, so the usual disclaimers apply :-)

I have been conducting basic tests to assess jCIFS performance against competing
implementations (Windows) and protocols (NFS). The tests involve reading from
and writing to the same NetApp filer, over CIFS (using java.io and jCIFS) and
NFS (java.io). Various buffer sizes are used (4kB to 1MB).

All tests were carried using the latest available version (1.2.21).

jCIFS parameters were not tuned (default values were kept). Only the buffer size
is changed; figures below correspond to the maximum that we get.

Here are a few results.

- jCIFS v. java.io on Windows (mapped network drive), 100Mb/s network:
          read   write
Windows    8.7    6.5
jCIFS      7.2    4.8

- jCIFS v. java.io on Solaris (NFS mount), 1Gb/s network:
          read   write
NFS        125     33
jCIFS       16      9

A good thing is that jCIFS compares well with the Windows implementation, as
performance is on par (I have read elsewhere on this forum that you can
sometimes even get better performance with jCIFS).

However I am a little surprised about two things:
- NFS performance is much better than with jCIFS
- overall, jCIFS throughput is somewhat low

Are those figures typical? What performance do you get in your environment?

Cheers,

Laurent