Chuck McIntyre wrote:
On 3/1/07, Matt Seitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Have you seen the post I made to cifs-protocol in the thread entitled
"Problem - CIFS network throughput vs. NFS"?
I used bonnie++ from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bonnie/ (a disk load benchmarking
application on CIFS vs. NFS) to generate results from the same client
against the same server just mounted in two different ways. The
results are staggeringly bad for CIFS vs. NFS.
Yes, I did. Unfortunately, that doesn't answer the question of why there is
such a performance difference. It could be the CIFS client, it could be the
server has better NFS server software than CIFS server software (you don't
mention what the server software is). If this is not an isolated network, it
could be an interaction with other clients or network traffic.
As you mention, it could be the CIFS client implementation, as
opposed to something inherent in the protocol, but I am having a hard
time believing it since it would also have to be something in the
SMBFS client.
It would be curious what the results would be with a Windows client with the
same hardware accessing a Windows server.
Of course, even that would not necessarily be proof. What is really needed is
an examination of a network trace and client and server logs to determine what
is causing the performance difference, and then determining whether that was
something inherent in the protocol, or a limitation of the client or server
implementation.
Can you recommend a "good" CIFS client that I can run the same
benchmark against?
The Microsoft Windows CIFS clients is probably the best. The problem is trying
to get a fair apples-to-apples comparison of a benchmark running on two
different machines with two different operating systems.
For Linux, the standard CIFS clients have been mostly noble one-man operations
with limited resources and a limited user base. The "smbfs" client has been all
but orphaned. Steve French is doing an admirable job with "cifs_vfs", but I
don't know how much optimization work he has done. There is at least one
commercial CIFS client for Linux, "Sharity":
http://www.obdev.at/products/sharity
At this point, the question really isn't "Why is CIFS slower than NFS?", it's
"Why are the Linux CIFS clients (smbfs, cifs_vfs) slower than the Linux NFS
client?". Given that, it might be more appropriate to continue this discussion
on the Linux cifs_vfs mailing list, where the developers can give a more
informed answer.
--
Sincerely,
Matthew Seitz
Customer Support Manager
NeoPath Networks, Inc.
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