Samba on AIX

[itsore08 at us.ibm.com]

Performance guru's,

We are currently testing how many Samba client connections each model of
RS/6000 can support. We've modified smbclient to attempt to connect 100,
250, 500, 1000, etc, clients per minute, to see what breaks first. :)

When using local user-level security, even with encryption, Samba performs
well, but using domain-level or server-level security it slows down and
many connections fail. 100 domain authentications per minute work fine
against a remote NT password server, but at about 600 domain connections
per minute almost 300 connections fail entirely.

When we run the same bulk authentication script against a FastConnect
server, or directly against the NT 4.0 PDC, we don't see this problem. Is
this to be expected, or are we doing something wrong?

Our test environment is currently:

PDC
===
- Pentium II @ 450 MHz
- 128 Mb RAM
- NT 4.0 SP 5

Samba Server
============
- RS/6000 43P260, dual Power3 @ 375 MHz
- 512 Mb RAM
- AIX 4.3.3 RM02
- Samba 2.0.6

Client
======
- RS/6000 F50, quad Power 604e @ 332 MHz
- 2 Gb RAM
- AIX 4.3.3 RM02
- Modified smbclient for batch testing

Thanks again,
Steven "Pemberton, not Poughkeepsie" P.