Some additional questions about benchmarking CIFS servers
bdavids1 at gmu.edu
bdavids1 at gmu.edu
Fri Jun 21 10:47:02 GMT 2002
NetBench is a protocol agnostic benchmark. You can connect via CIFS,
NFS, NCP, etc. Having said that, I don't think NetBench is that great
of a benchmarking utility.
Response times are at least as important as bandwidth.
http://www.netapp.com/ftp/usenix-nt97.pdf has some good info on how
latency can looked at when using NetBench (I haven't looked at recent
versions of NetBench, which seem to have some response time stuff added
in. Maybe it does all of that now).
I'm hoping to do some benchmarking soon. The University I work for is
currently evaluating NetWare (what we currently use), Windows 2000 and
Samba for our future file/print solution. We've got 3 Dell 2550
servers, and a Dell|EMC Clariion 4500 which I'm hoping I'll be allowed
to use for some benchmarking. I might be able to use up to about 200
lab workstations.
My plan is to compare NetWare 6.0, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and
Samba, with all running on identical servers & connected to SAN
hardware.
There would be 3 NetWare benchmarks - NCP to NSS filesystem, CIFS to
traditional filesystem & CIFS to NSS filesystem
Windows 2000 Advanced server would just be CIFS to NTFS (FAT doesn't
have ACLs)
Samba would run on Linux, and would compare all journaling filesystems
that support ACLs.
That's the plan, at least. I'm hoping to get it approved. I'm really
curious to see NetWare vs. Samba numbers. From NetBench results I've
found on the net, it seems like they both have close to twice the peak
bandwith of Windows 2000, but I haven't seen any results of CIFS access
to NetWare.
One thing I would like to test for, but I'm not quite sure how to go
about it, is how many concurrent connections can each solution
support? NetBench doesn't really tell you that. It tells you how the
server performs with a given number of active users. Most users are
idle most of the time.
If we swtich from our current NetWare environment to Linux/Samba, it
would be nice to know if we need more servers, the same # of servers,
or less servers. I think I know the answer to that if we go with
Windows... Well, I don't actually - that's why I'd like to be able to
test it.
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