Samba performance and sizeing

[Peter Polkinghorne]

We are moving from a PCNFS client to SMB client environment and hence moving 
from NFS for our Sun fileservers to Samba.  I have seen figures indicating 
Samba is as good NT for SMB service.  However what we are concerned with is:

a) relative performance of Samba vs  Sun's NFS

b) loading on servers with lots of active connections (and hence lots of 
smbds).  Do you need more memory than with comparable NFS set up?
Do you need more processing power?

Any pointers to results or hints gratefully received.

I realise things are complicated by the ever increasing power of the clients 
(ie moving from mixed 486/pentium Win 3.1 to pentium NT client base).

Currently our home directory servers are typically: Ultra 1s with 100Mb ether 
and 128Mb and several hundred users.
Software servers are similar and typically support upto 30 classroom and upto 
200 office clients.

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| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
| Peter.Polkinghorne at brunel.ac.uk   +44 1895 274000 x2561       UK          |
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