[Samba] Re: samba on quad core vs dual core

[Mark Nienberg]

John Drescher wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 2:21 PM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 2:14 PM, Mark Nienberg <gmane at tippingmar.com> wrote:
>>> For a new file server that doesn't really do much other than run samba, is
>>> there any advantage to quad core CPUs vs dual core?  Say the two options are
>>> equivalent in price.


>> I have not seen much on my gigabit network (servers and clients). The
>> cpu usage is generally low even on single core servers with 5 TB of
>> software raid 5. With that said I did order a q9950 and a new
>> motherboard to replace a single core system today but that was because
>> of a stability problem and not for performance  reasons. $450 US for
>> the mobo (asus p5q pro + CPU is certainly not going to break the
>> budget.

I guess what I'm wondering is will samba actually use all those cores or will it just 
use one, in which case maybe I'd be better of with a faster dual core than a quad. 
You're right though, that the server I am replacing is an older single core chip and 
it doesn't have any trouble keeping up with demand, so probably any recent chip will 
work fine.

Mark