Some additional questions about benchmarking CIFS servers

[Richard Sharpe]

Hi,

During some discussions yesterday with some folks, I realized that a 
couple of additional deficiencies that NetBench has are:

1. All the clients connect at the beginning of the benchmark, and do not 
disconnect until the end of the benchmark. Connection handling is an 
important aspect of a CIFS benchmark, and while you do not expect every 
client to be disconnecting and reconnecting every five seconds, you do 
expect a certain connection load, perhaps 5% of the overall clients would 
connect and disconnect from the server twice during the benchmark.

Secondly, the NetBench benchmark does not disconnect after the setup 
phase. Indeed, the way it works seems to prevent this (you net use the 
server manually or through a script on each client), however, servers will 
cache on a per-client basis and the server may have cached the files that 
were created in the setup phase.

2. Likewise, logon handling is not explored at all by the NetBench 
benchmark. To what extent is it important to have a schedule of accounts 
and cycle through them (and to what extent can rpcclient be used to create 
accounts on the server)?

3. NetBench uses a very small number of SMB operations as far as I can 
tell (12 or 13) and does not explore some areas that I feel should be 
used, like locking (guess what I hacked into my program last night). There 
are others, however, like change notify, etc. 

To what extent do people feel that these are relevant to a CIFS benchmark, 
and what other areas have I missed.
 
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe at ns.aus.com, rsharpe at samba.org, 
sharpe at ethereal.com