Performance shock

[Henning Kilset Pedersen]

Peter Lieverdink wrote:

> 
> On a slightly more serious note though; yes, Linux/samba has pretty much
> always been faster on any file serving system I've ever used. (Notable
> exception when using samba to write to a usb key, Linux didn't seem to
> like that very much).
> 
> I think the Linux default setup tries to cache I/O as much as it can and
> flushes to disk whenever it feels like. Windows doesn't (crashes too
> often to rely on ram cache?) and that would kill performance. I think
> the ram cache on XP Pro is only a few Mb anyway and would need tuning
> (Netcraft!) before it started performing more acceptably.

Well. XP Pro isn't really designed to be a fileserver. Linux is more 
"one size fits all" while the different versions of Windows are actually 
tuned "out of the box" for their particular purpose. XP Pro can give 
more than the default priority to cache and file/network-serving threads 
through My Computer-Properties-Advanced-Performance Settings-Advanced 
(yeah, I know it's hidden).

A more "real-world" comparison would be to compare against Win 2003.

On another note, Samba *IS* really fast. Just trying to make sure that 
comparisons are done on a fair basis here :)

Kind regards,
Henning Pedersen