Samba performance and sizeing

[Peter Polkinghorne]

Firstly thanks for those who replied to my request.

Responses have suggested:

Samba would use less resources that NFS.

Samba would use more memory, but equivalent processing power.

This broadly fits in with my impression that the protocol is not radically 
different in efficiency from NFS, data still has to fetched & writen to discs, 
and the main difference is that (for Suns) the NFS stuff is in kernel threads, 
while Samba has per connection user process.

One of my colleagues did some measurements and what was seen was as follows:

Solaris 2.5.1 Sparc server, Samba 1.9.18p3 server and clients.

Each connection used ~ 1.7Mb of memory.

This implies if we expect lots of connections that are reasonably active (ie 
deadtime will not remove), then extra memeory for servers is required.  
Luckily this is not expensive these days :-).

Otherwise nothing remarkable on performance measurements.  Guess we could 
publish more detailed figures if there is interest.

-- 
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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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