Samba scalability?

[Pat]

Shawn Wright wrote:

> I'm in the process of upgrading several of our NT4 servers, and
> must decide what services I can safely migrate to Linux/Samba,
> and which need to remain on NT.
>
> Currently our two NT4 server carrying the heaviest file sharing load
> deal with about 150 concurrent user connections, and will see 600-
> 1200 file locks during normal use. Most of this is user home
> shares, with some shared network apps thrown in; clients are 90%
> NT4 WKS, with some student win9x PCs and laptops.
>
> I've run various low use samba servers over the past 5 years or so,
> but have never attempted to fully replace an NT4 box as they have
> been rock solid (surprisingly) for us. What samba issues should I
> be prepared to address to deal with this kind of load? Does samba
> benefit from an SMP system? How are the software RAID drivers
> in Linux? (the current NT4 box I'm planning to migrate to Samba
> over Linux is a PPro200 with 224Mb, and 3 Adaptec 3940UW
> SCSI cards, with 4 9Gb Cheetah drives running software RAID -
> stock NT4 drivers)

As far as I know it should handle the load just fine, maybe even better
the Windows.

The software raid of linux is working great!  I'm running a redhat 7.0
system with 4 maxtor 40GB ATA/66 drives using software raid 5 on them.
The performance is out standing.  I had to tweek the install to be able
to set up the ide drives the way I wanted since the 2.2.x kernel will
only support 4 ide channels.  But after installing redhat on it and
upgrading to the 2.4.0 kernel it is running great. with 5 ide hard
drives each on there own channel.

But enough rambiling...   In your case it would be real easy to set up
since you are running scsi drives..  The easiest way would be to use
redhats install to set up the software raid device.  All you have to do
is create a partition that is the same size on each drive and set it to
type Linux Raid using the diskdruid in the install, then the make raid
device button will become active when you have created at least two raid
partitions.  Then you click that button and you can select witch
partitions you want included in the raid device, and what raid level you
want.  After that the install program does everything else for you.
When the system is installed and rebooted it will auto detect the raid
parttions and mount them upon startup.

>
>
> I've heard talk about open file limits in the smbd process - is this
> only an issue with WTS clients? I'd appreciate any tips for tuning
> samba for this type of environment.
>

I couldn't help you there. I'm only using mine on a small network, so I
don't have that problem.  But I think it is only an issue with WTS where
you have multiple users connecting to the same share on one machine.

>
> One more big question: I'm not tied to Linux by any means, as I've
> used various BSDs over the years, so I'd by interested to know if
> there is a particular advantage to running samba over a certain
> platform, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc?

I'm only running Linux, so I don't know.

>
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide.
>
> ========================
> Shawn Wright
> Computer Systems Manager
> Shawnigan Lake School
> http://www.sls.bc.ca
> swright at sls.bc.ca