Samba scalability?

[Matthew Geddes]

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.

We've had over 300 concurrent connections. We're doing the whole lot on
a Linux box with Samba 2.0.7. The box itself is a 450MHz Celery
processor and 256MB RAM. The HDD is a single 13GB IDE. It sometimes uses
a fair amount of swap, but we've not had any complaints. This box also
manages a connection from each machine to it's closest printer. This box
is not a PDC or WINS server.

> 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 think most of these are fine. I've never tried BSD under a big load,
but Samba certainly runs on it ;-)

Matt