[Samba] Which filesystem to increase Samba performances ?

[Shawn Wright]

I have been gradually moving our user storage from NT servers to RH 
Linux servers over the past two years, and have found the following based 
on our very specific needs:

SGI's XFS filesystem on RedHat 7.x has been a stable platform since 
going into production on a machine serving 400 students last year. It is 
running fairly modest hardware (P3/500, non-raid UW-SCSI disks) but is 
able to keep up with much faster NT machines quite well, even when 
dealing with over 100 concurrent users.
Last summer, when it came time for another server migration, I looked 
into EXT3 as an alternative to XFS and encountered the following:

Performance with EXT3 was below that of XFS 1.1 in nearly every case, 
often by more than 15%. Tests were by no means scientific, but consisting 
of repeated cycles of file reading & writing to/from NT clients. Times were 
measured multiple iterations with file sizes of 8K, 50K, 1Mb and 10Mb.

If EXT3 had other redeeming qualities, I could have overlooked the 
performance issues, but it didn't: 
-quotas: this is something we *need* and they work nicely in XFS, but I 
had no success getting them to work with EXT3 on Redhat 7.3
-ACLs: this is another thing we *need*, and the situation was very similar 
to quotas - I had no luck getting them going.

I ended up leaving the new machine with the XFS 1.1 installer version of 
Redhat, since I could not afford the time to get quotas and ACLs going on 
EXT3.

Keep in mind, all the above is very specific to our environment, where 
flexible security (ACLs), quotas, performance, and stability are all critically 
important factors.



On 13 Jan 2003 at 22:16, Jean-Charles Preaux wrote:

> hello,
> i'm a new suscriber of this mailing-list, hoping i'll be able to help u.
> But before i've a question.
> I've to mount a huge file server using Samba.
> We bought a new server, using raid 5 technology.
> My question is, now i've to install on it my favorite operating system :)
> and i ask me which filesystem type i've to use to increase Samba 
performances on it, some people said me "xfs", others "ext3"...
> Which one do u recommend me and why ?
> hoping i've been clear with my question.
> thanks.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jean-Charles Preaux
> 
> (o_
> //\
> V_/_ Debian GNU/Linux user.
> 
> E-mail : jean-charles at preaux.org
> 
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Shawn Wright, I.T. Manager
Shawnigan Lake School
swright at SLS.bc.ca
http://Zuiko.sls.bc.ca/swright
http://www.sls.bc.ca