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Samba Beats Windows IT Week Labs Test Results

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thrashing-the-competition dept.

jmhowitt writes "Tests by IT Week Labs show the latest version of the open-source Samba file and print server software is 2.5 times faster than Windows Server 2003 in the same role. The news comes as many firms are grappling with the consequences of Microsoft ending support for NT4, coupled with uncertainty about when Microsoft will next update Windows. The performance difference between Windows Server 2003 and Samba 3 has increased dramatically compared with Samba 2 and Windows 2000 Server."

6 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. The best thing about Samba... by _Hellfire_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    Apart from how bloody quick it is is the fact that you can log every transaction. This is immensely useful in a mission critical environment when you have to figure our exactly why one person in particular out of the entire network is having trouble. Check your Samba logs and 99.9% of the time your answer will be there.

    As a system administrator I appreciate having that level of scrutiny on any network I take care of.

    --
    "And then I visited Wikipedia ...and the next 8 hours are a blur..."
  2. Knowledge of the protocol by MadX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I read a while ago about some of the SAMBA developers having a better grasp of how the services / protocol all tie together, than the M$ employees doing the development. Most of the current M$ team inherited code from the older versions of the OS, and they are merely building on top of this codebase. The SAMBA team have had to reverse engineer the protocol. So it seems to make sense therefore, that should you understand it better, you can sqeeze more out of the service on the whole. It therefore appears that it can only get better and better as they develop ..
    I also don't know how many developers are on the samba team in total (contributors / developers), but I would almost start assuming more than the manpower assigned by M$ to this area of code for Windows .. And with it being opensource, bugs are easier to find ...

    1. Re:Knowledge of the protocol by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good points. Here's an additional one: the Samba team doesn't have PHBs to get in the way. In my limited experience, if you're given an existing codebase and told to improve on it, that's exactly what you're expected to do - and it's all you're expected to do. You can't discover that "wow, this legacy code is crap," throw the offending chunks away and write something that works correctly and is more stable and/or secure.

      The Samba team has complete freedom with their code, while the Microsoft developers do not.

      --
      [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
  3. Uh, where are the benchmarks? by Fefe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where are the numbers?

    Where are the graphs?

    The article basically quotes some guy (who is actually selling Samba and thus has a vested interest) saying that Samba is 2.5 times faster than Windows 2003.

    Now I have no reason not to believe him, but I was expecting a little more. And I'd wager the suits considering switching to Samba also expect more.

  4. The numbers.... by Bill_Mische · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are a lot of people asking about the numbers.

    Well, I get the print edition of IT Week and the numbers are there on page 19, in the form of a lovely little graph. The (print) article says they used a HP ProLiant BL10 eCLass Server (900MHz PIII, 40Gb ATA, 512Mb Ram) and goes in to a little detail about the benchmarking software used.

    I couldn't see a copy of the article on their website but you can download an electronic copy, in some god-forsaken windows only ebook format, from www.itweek.co.uk/ebook.

    --
    Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
  5. We just decided to use Samba by SailFly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a networking, sysadmin, programmer (mostly programmer) consultant for small businesses in Sarasota, Florida. Most of my customers are small businesses (less than 12 people) and are looking for ways to keep costs down.

    After proposing a new 2.4GHz server with Win2k3, they were sticker shocked and decided to not hire me for the job. Then one of THEM mentioned Linux (which I love and hav used for 5 years). I told them that I use Linux in my software development practice, and we could consider this as an alternative for File Server (Samba), centralized security (ldap) and backups (Mandrake backup utility). We're also using VNC (realvnc.org) for remote desktop. I can also easily SSH and do remote X session from my office, or use VNC.

    It's been up for a week now, and they LOVE IT! It's fast, flexible, and you cant beat the price. And I've learned my Lesson to be mention Linux even when they specifically ask for Windows (I'm not a pushy sales person, but I do believe an presenting choices to my customers)

    They wanted to outsource their IT department (the owner doesn't ever want to worry or think about their IT issues), so we made a deal that allows me to keep their systems updated, but doesn't force him to hire an on-site IT person.

    Speed was NOT an issue for the Samba server, since they mostly use MS Office (win xp pro workstations) documents. However, this was a great step for them to embrace and support open source software (I donate to several projects in turn).

    I hope this story might help somebody who is considering doing something similar. I'm happy to answer any questions about our experiences.

    -Scott James

    --
    Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL