[Samba] Windows 2000 vs NT4 ...

[scottt at methodstudios.com]

Hi.

We have a linux box serving samba to about 10 workstations, mostly running maya. The server is also used by a
20 machine render farm. We recently switched these 30 machines from NT4 to Windows 2000, and have noticed a significant
reduction in performance as a result - particularly with reading large sequences of image files into the workstations.

The load generated by firing off a render across 20 machines can be quite high - particularly when maya scene files
grow large, and all of the render boxen try to load the scene at once and then write their rendered frames back at more
or less the same time, but under W2K we see much greater server loading than we ever saw under NT4.

The server in question is a single proc 1Ghz P3, with 1GB RAM and a 3ware RAID controller. The box has a 4 x 100Mb
ethernet bonded pipe into a switch shared with the other machines. It is running a 2.4.16 kernel with the SGI XFS patch,
and samba 2.2.5.

My main concern is the huge increase in CPU load when there are many files open - we seldom saw 100 percent CPU useage 
when all the clients were NT4, but now that they're all W2K it's become all too common ...

S.