Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide, The

Chapter 38. Samba Performance Tuning

Comparisons

The Samba server uses TCP to talk to the client. Thus if you are trying to see if it performs well, you should really compare it to programs that use the same protocol. The most readily available programs for file transfer that use TCP are ftp or another TCP-based SMB server.

If you want to test against something like an NT or Windows for Workgroups server, then you will have to disable all but TCP on either the client or server. Otherwise, you may well be using a totally different protocol (such as NetBEUI) and comparisons may not be valid.

Generally, you should find that Samba performs similarly to ftp at raw transfer speed. It should perform quite a bit faster than NFS, although this depends on ...