load balancing question

John E. Malmberg wb8tyw at qsl.net
Tue Oct 8 01:54:00 GMT 2002


Javid Abdul-AJAVID1 wrote:
> MSDFS is filey system right, how will it help to load balance samba
> connections
> what criteria does it rely to load balance ( like memory, or no of
> connetions etc.. )

MSDFS does not really load balance.  MSDFS distributes the 
subdirectories of a directory between multiple servers transparently to 
the clients.

So if each of your clients is accessing different files from different 
directories, then MSDFS can improve your performance.


If all the clients are accessing the same files in the same directory, 
than you will need to either get a large enough single server, or you 
will need a file system that supports multiple hosts with a direct 
connection concurrent access to the disks.


This is not really a SAMBA issue, because if the underlying filesystem 
and hosts support this, then SAMBA will transparently.  I have received 
reports of SAMBA 1.19.x being used on a shared disk access OpenVMS cluster.

There are also commercial LANMAN servers for some of these platforms, 
including those of my employer that run as a single process instead of 
the multiple process model of SAMBA.

I do not know of any competative benchmarks between the commercial 
LANMAN servers and SAMBA.  Such benchmarks could be difficult to 
instrument properly, and are highly dependent on the skill of the system 
administrator for each system, and the quality of the compilers for that 
platform.

So it really depends on the specific client load as to what the best 
solution for you would be.  It may require a more detailed engineering 
than could be done in a mailing list.

The multiple SAMBA processes may not be the bottleneck for your proposed 
process.  If the platorm knows how to share the code segment in memory, 
and the disks have good caching, the overhead for the processes may not 
be significant.


-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
Personal Opinion Only




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