*Warning - The following may sound inflammatory, but it is meant as constructive criticism.*
Main Linux box info: CPU: 800 MHz Athlon (old) SlotA M/B: ASUS K7A BIOS 1007 RAM: 256 MB PC133 ECC (swap turned off) Samba (2.2.1a and below): One thing that I noticed a little while back is that transferring large files from my Samba server to my Windows box tops out at ~6 MB/s over my 100BaseTX switched LAN. I noticed that NFS running between two of my computers in Linux mode (same two computers) could do ~9 MB/s so I first thought that maybe it was a Windows thing On further inspection I noticed that this (6 MB/s cap under Samba) still held true when both machines where in Linux mode. More recently my roommate installed Windows XP on his system and I noticed that it (the XP machine) could push ~9 MB/s to my main Linux box while my main Linux box (mdk 8.1) could only push ~6 MB/s. This leads me to believe that Samba (2.2.1a and below) has inferior performance to Windows XP when it comes to handling large files. 3ware card (Escalade 6800): When I had a Promise controller and one 45 GB IBM drive I could consistently get 35.75 MB/s out of the drive when I ran hdparm under mdk 7.2. Not only that, I could run several disk intensive tasks simultaneously and still burn CDs at 8x and listen to mp3s without a hitch. I mean the system ran very smoothly no matter what I did with it. When I hooked up another Promise controller and 3 more identical hard drives, I couldn't get things to work under the stock kernel, so I tried out what was then the band spanking new 2.4 kernel. First couple of attempts didn't go well do to problems with the kernel that have since then resolved Once I got one of the early 2.4 kernels to work I set up a 3 disk software RAID 5. When I ran hdparm on it I was able to get ~50 MB/s. Also I noticed that performance while hammering the array could get a little jerky, it was still fairly acceptable. When I put in the 3ware card and stuck 4 of those 45 GB IBM drives on it, performance was very poor compared to running software RAID on Promise controllers, even when swap is turned off and filing systems explicitly optimized for the array. The worst was with mdk 8.0 and the default BIOS revision with large writes. The whole system would just pause while dumping stuff to the array for minutes at a time making CD burning and mp3 playing impossible. mdk 8.1 and a newer BIOS revision fix that to a great extent, but the performance still sucks. For example running hdparm yields results from 27 MB/s to 39 MB/s while with software RAID 5 on Promise controllers on the same machine yielded ~50 MB/s. (3ware brags about how their architecture is so superior to using the PCI bus for everything.) The benchmarks that I have seen online suggest that under a similar setup running NT I should be able to realize something more like 90 MB/s on that 3ware card. Plus whenever I have a stream significantly over 6 MB/s either from or two the disks (like copying files from one computer to another) the performance of my Linux box becomes really jerky and mp3s start breaking up and and if I'm burning a CD at 8x the buffers will empty out regularly. (Even when I was pounding 3 disks simultaneously under the Promise controllers the buffers stayed mostly full.)
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