Skip to Main Content
Using Samba
book

Using Samba

by Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown, Peter Kelly
November 1999
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
413 pages
16h 7m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Using Samba

Appendix B. Samba Performance Tuning

This appendix discusses various ways of performance tuning and system sizing with Samba. Performance tuning is the art of finding bottlenecks and adjusting to eliminate them. Sizing is the practice of eliminating bottlenecks by spending money to avoid having them in the first place. Normally, you won’t have to worry about either with Samba. On a completely untuned server, Samba will happily support a small community of users. However, on a properly tuned server, Samba will support at least twice as many users. This chapter is devoted to outlining various performance-tuning and sizing techniques that you can use if you want to stretch your Samba server to the limit.

A Simple Benchmark

How do you know if you’re getting reasonable performance? A simple benchmark is to compare Samba with FTP. Table 2.1 shows the throughput, in kilobytes per second, of a pair of servers: a medium-size Sun SPARC Ultra and a small Linux Pentium server. Numbers are reported in kilobytes per second (KB/s).

Table B-1. Sample Benchmark Benchmarks

Command

FTP

Untuned Samba

Tuned Samba

Sparc get

1014.5

645.3

866.7

Sparc put

379.8

386.1

329.5

Pentium get

973.27

N/A

725

Pentium put

1014.5

N/A

1100

If you run the same tests on your server, you probably won’t see the same numbers. However, you should see similar ratios of Samba to FTP, probably in the range of 68 to 80 percent. It’s not a good idea to base all of Samba’s throughput against FTP. The golden ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Using Samba, Second Edition

Using Samba, Second Edition

Jay Ts, Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown
Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Uday Sawant, Oliver Pelz, Jonathan Hobson, William Leemans

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565924495Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata