Samba Performance vs. X-Windows/Telnet

Robin J. Cox robin.j.cox at mci.com
Thu Oct 23 12:40:00 GMT 1997


Greetings,
I'm a true believer in samba and attempt to induct most people
in my workgroup into using it to map/mount drives to get
thier work done.  There are two factions in the work group:  those
like me who prefer samba and a direct mount, and those who
prefer an X windows session to run emacs or the SUN common
desktop environment (also an X derivative).  We all use some
variation of Windows (95/NT3.5/NT4.0) to access our UNIX
box.

However, it seems lately (especially in the afternoons) the
performance via the samba mount is very slow; I type a key in
the editor and it takes about 2 seconds for it to come back.

I do not see this degradation when connecting to the same
machine through an xterm window or using the vi editor, i.e.,
the slowness comes via the mounting I believe.

Is there a way to tell why there is such a vast difference
in performance and/or to tune samba or the UNIX machine (it
is a SUN SPARC).  Would NFS cause this slowness as well?

Unfortunately our NIS department does not support samba; we
(in development) have to do it ourselves.

Thanks very much

Robin J. Cox
MCI
Colorado Springs, CO


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