Samba Speed

[Stokes]

 I have a comment to make on this speed issue, but not regarding NT or 2k...

 Couple of months ago I decided to convert my samba server from FreeBSD to
 Linux, and so I installed linux and configured Samba on the machine, but
when I started transfering data (60 gigs total) I noticed some strange
behavior on the server.  Normally, with the FreeBSD Samba server, I would
get anywhere from 50-80 Mbits/sec over a 100Mbit line, constant.  But with
this linux box, I would get about 60Mbits for maybe 15 seconds, and then no
data transfer at all for the next 20 seconds or so.  Then, back to 60Mbits,
and then another 20 seconds of nothing.  So I fired up "top" on the linux
box and watched what was happening.  While the smbd process was taking up
about 20-30% of the CPU, this other process, kupdate, was consuming the
remaining processor power on my server.  So I was only able to get high
transfer rates in spurts, and my server was brought to its knees during that
time.

 The server box in this case was a PII-400 with 256 megs RAM.  The kupdate
 process did not consume any processor time when smbd was not being used.

 I tried rebooting, reconfiguring Samba, everything I could think of, and I
 never got decent, consistent data transfer rates to the linux box.  So I
was
 forced to return to FreeBSD where I can always get a constant 50-80 Mbits
 with minimal overhead (smbd never uses more than 25% of CPU on FreeBSD,
 which means that my server can actually do other things while people are
 transferring data).

 Has anyone had any experiences with linux performing poorly during massive
 data transfers?  It surprises me greatly that linux would be so drastically
 out-performed by FreeBSD when so many people use linux on their servers....
 but hey, a lot of fools use NT servers, so I guess it shouldn't be that big
 of a shocker.

 Appreciate any comments,
 Stokes

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Greg J. Zartman, P.E." <greg at leiinc.com>
> To: "Samba Mailing List" <samba-ntdom at us5.samba.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 3:45 PM
> Subject: Samba Speed
>
>
> > I am curious as to anyone has experience with the speed of a Samba 2.2
> > alpha2 PDC based network compared with a comparably configured NT PDC
> > network.  With my current configuration, I'm getting about a 50% greater
> > performance transferring files with the NT PDC network over Samba?
> >
> > Anyone else have any experience with this?  I can't seem to find
anything
> in
> > the FAQs or other documents that seem to influence the results.
> >
> > Thank you.
> >
> > Greg J. Zartman, P.E.
> >
> >
>