Performance of Samba across various Linux filesystems

[Steven French]

Re tridges lkml posting on Samba perf on various filesystems: 
http://lwn.net/Articles/112567/

Our Linux filesystem performance test lead commented  "As mentioned in the 
LKML thread DBench only uses about 10MB/client.  I forget how many clients 
were run when collecting these results, but the entire data set fit in the 
2GB memory of the Server.  So what this test breaks down into is how well 
metadata and journal is written to disk.  This is know to be the primary 
weak point of JFS when the journal is on a slow device (as in this case). 
My team is looking into the DBench JFS issue (since this is really the 
only perf issue we have left with JFS)."

Apparently current test results when the benchmark working set exceeds the 
server side memory size the results still show the expected (ext3 slow, 
jfs and xfs faster) on most server fs benchmarks.

Be interesting if others have more data points.   Due to the lack of good 
quota support on ext3, I suspect most real world big server users still 
would lean to XFS or JFS.



Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at-sign us dot ibm dot com