[ale] file serving

[Benjie Godfrey]

At Layton we run a lot of samba servers on two different hardware
platforms ( x86 and sparc) with various cpu speeds ( pentium, pII,
sparc, ultrasparc, etc.)  These servers supply large TIFF and PDF files
to 100+ connections and the only thing that I have experienced having a
significant impact on performance is disk subsystem.  SCSI beats IDE
everytime.  I have a pentium 133 with two wide SCSI disks that
consistently outperforms a PIII with an IDE raid system.  The amount of
system RAM will also be more important than the cpu speed for file
serving performance. Something else to consider is that IDE drives are
CPU dependent for operation also,  that is they require a clock cycle
for every individual operation ( read, seek, write.)  SCSI is completely
independent of the CPU.

My 2 cents.

Benjie
-- 
"Time makes more converts than reason."

--Thomas Paine


James B. Godfrey
Systems Administrator
Layton Graphics, Inc.
Marietta, Georgia, USA
www.layton-graphics.com