[TriLUG] Samba vs NFS -- Speed difference, why?

Jason Tower jason at cerient.net
Mon Jun 20 11:28:20 EDT 2005


just to clarify this point, i was testing transfer speed using my t42 
with ubuntu.  file transfers using nfs would occur at wire speed (12.5 
MB/s) while the exact same file transferred using smb (mounted with 
smbmount) would only be about 5.5 MB/s.

however, when i booted into windows on the t42 i could copy the file 
(with smb of course) at nearly wire speed.  so it seems that at least 
part of the perceived problem has something to do with the smb *client*, 
not the server.  cpu utilization and iowait was not even close to being 
a bottleneck so i'm not sure where the slowdown is occuring or why.

jason

John Broome wrote:
> I have a RH 9 machine that is acting as a fileserver for a completly
> windows network (98 & 2000), the users mentioned that the file
> transfers seemed slow.
> 
> Some testing showed that samba was moving data much slower than NFS. 
> Nfs was using pretty much the entire speed potential of the network,
> where SMB was about half that, or less.
> 
> No indication on the server that CPU, HDD, or memory is the problem.
> 
> When tested off site with different hardware and a different OS
> (Ubuntu 5.04), the same problem popped up.
> 
> SMB dragging along, NFS cranking.
> 
> Since this is a mostly windows network we can't really use NFS instead
> of the samba.
> 
> Has anyone else run into this?  Some googling doesn't really turn up much.



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