[Gllug] Samba / W2K file sharing comparison

[Xander D Harkness]

If anyone is looking for an argument to replace windows boxes with Linux 
at work, I thought you might like to see this study on 
searchenterpriselinux.

The bit I really like is:

"But these figures do not tell the complete story. With Windows 2000 
Advanced Server, the FAT32 system failed at 32 clients, the NTFS file 
system I/O dropped to 12 MB/s at 60 concurrent clients. By comparison, 
the Samba on Linux system still delivered I/O at 29 MB/s with 60 
concurrent clients. Each client was running a simulated Ziff-Davis 
NetBench test."


http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid39_gci880608,00.html

IT shops want to know if Linux and Samba can match the scalability of 
Microsoft's Windows 2000 and its print and file servers. Can the 
Linux/Samba team make the grade in enterprise environments?

Terpstra: Every system has inherent design limitations that become its 
bottleneck. Generally speaking, the slowest component that is involved 
in the services being evaluated will be the primary limiting factor in 
the benchmarks obtained. Workloads that are used to measure scalability 
should be reflective of the type of work that the file server will be 
expected to handle.

So, this results in clear limitations when comparing benchmark figures 
and goes a long way toward explaining some of the wide gaps that have 
been reported in published Samba versus Windows file serving performance 
reports.

On a system that has a file I/O capacity of 450MBytes/sec, 1 gigabit 
ethernet, and 1 Gigabyte of RAM:

     * MS Windows 2000 Advanced Server:

           FAT32 file system: Peak I/O 37.6 MB/s at 20 clients
           NTFS file system: Peak I/O 27 MB/s at 10 clients

     * Samba 2.2.5 on Linux 2.4.18:

           Ext2 file system: Peak I/O 36 MB/s at 5 clients

But these figures do not tell the complete story. With Windows 2000 
Advanced Server, the FAT32 system failed at 32 clients, the NTFS file 
system I/O dropped to 12 MB/s at 60 concurrent clients. By comparison, 
the Samba on Linux system still delivered I/O at 29 MB/s with 60 
concurrent clients. Each client was running a simulated Ziff-Davis 
NetBench test.

Have fun
Xander


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