From: "Geo." 

"Joe Barr"  wrote in message
news:pan.2003.05.09.23.40.18.961501{at}austin.rr.com...

> http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0509.barr.html
>
> Microsoft claims Windows 2003 Server is twice as fast as Linux, at least
> when it's used for file serving. I spoke to Jeremy Allison, head of the
> Samba team, who provided a few insights into the test configurations that
> don't leap out at the reader because they are hidden away in appendixes to
> the benchmark document. Allison feels this, in itself, is substantially
> responsible for the outcome.

from the article:

>"If you look at the curves in the benchmarks, what is really really obvious
is that Samba, or the kernel, isn't running out of steam," Allison
said. "What's running out of steam is the disk subsystem." <

I agree with him on the RAID0 setup it could easily be disk, I don't know
anyone using RAID0 for a fileserver (isn't your data important?) but:

>RAID 0 wasn't the only poor choice for Linux in the tests. "They used ext3,
which is one of the slowest filesystems on Linux," <

I can't agree on this point, ext2 isn't suitable since it's so easy to wipe
out with a simple power failure. In a fileserver you have to be able to
count
on the file system coming back up after a hard poweroff. Fileservers are
where everyone stores their data, the file system is critical. ext3 is the
only choice.

I also don't agree with his other ramblings about unfair tweaks to the
system as he pointed out above, the bottleneck was disk so any other tweaks
are pointless, even with RAID0 the bottleneck is still disk.

This leaves 2 questions in my mind, first how would they have compared if
neither machine was running RAID0 but instead were running RAID1 and then
running RAID5 (much more common configurations for fileservers) and second
but perhaps meaningless to this test is why is RH's RAID0 so sucky? RAID0's
whole purpose is for speed.

Geo.

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