Samba scalability?

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, 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)

Rembebr that at this stage samba does not support trust relationships,
also stay tuned for samba 2.2 as it will give many improvements in PDC
code (More RPC supported) and in native NT printing.

The raid software run just fine, I'm using raid level 1 on 2 18GB scsi
disk and the server has never been so stable and serves home directories
at an amazingly fast rate (thorough NFS) on our clients.


>
> 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.

No that's a normal limitation for normal process, it may be bypassed using
ulimt command in startup scripts.
eg:
# Set max number files limit to 16384
ulimit -Hn 16384
ulimit -Sn 16384

this is in my /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb script before launching smbd and nmbd
>
> 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?
>
> 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
>
>

-- 
Simo Sorce - Integrazione Sistemi Unix/Windows - Politecnico di Milano
E-mail: simo.sorce at polimi.it
Tel.int: 02 2399 2425 - Fax.int. 02 2399 2451
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