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Date:      Tue, 18 Jun 1996 23:23:08 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au
Subject:   Re: (SMB/Netware/NFS for DOS clients) (was BSD/OS ...)
Message-ID:  <199606181353.XAA25533@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <9606181038.AA28251@wavehh.hanse.de> from "Martin Cracauer" at Jun 18, 96 12:38:02 pm

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Martin Cracauer stands accused of saying:
> 
> >Personally I can't see any reason for using Netware over Samba in a small to
> >medium-sized environment; it's performance is very good and it's much 
> >cheaper 8)  (I expect the admin tools for the NetCon server are much better
> >however).
> 
> I've not been able to get acceptable performance out of samba. Not
> more than 300-400 KB out of a 10Mbit-EThernet PCI 486 with 3com or WD
> ISA ethernet card (or 200 KB/sec out of small Sparcs with SunOS). My
> impression is that samba works fine, but is slow. Even PC-NFS on the
> same machines reach a higher bandwidth, not to speak of a Windows NT
> box serving NetBIOS (the on of our windows fraction fills 10 MB
> ethernet easily). CPU time consumption is not the problem with samba,
> the CPU is idle, the Ethernet unloaded, just the latency is too high
> (as it seems to me).
> 
> If you think your samba servers are faster, could you please post some
> benchmark results, reading and writeing a file in - say - 8 KB block
> from a Win95 machine?

Our previous software suite (pre-FreeBSD) used samba for fileservice on 
a number of workstations (Sun IPX, Alphastations), and DOS clients using
low-performance ISA ethernet cards.

Our primary demand on the network was directory lookups (finding the 
next filename in a spool directory with up to 700 files in it) and bulk 
writes to the server (several MB in a solid chunk).

Unfortunately, the last system of this type around now is out at our
field station surrounded by a foot or so of mud, and I'm not inclined to 
make the hours drive there to get some numbers 8)  however I know we were
getting over 400K/sec out of a 486DX2/66 using a WD8003 to the IPX, and
closer to 600K/sec when we were testing the DEC DC21040 cards in a PCI
486DX4/100.

Read performance was never an issue for us, but in "general use" around
the office there were no complaints about performance when I ditched the 
last OS/2 server for FreeBSD/Samba.

I'm particularly amazed that PC-NFS works well for you - we were seeing 
really atrocious write performance from it (and most other NFS clients)
when we tried it. (~50-70K/sec was common)

Your mileage may, and obviously does, vary 8)

> Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>  -  BSD User Group Hamburg

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and      (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496       [[
]] realtime instrument control          (ph/fax)  +61-8-267-3039        [[
]] Collector of old Unix hardware.      "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick  [[



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