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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