How many clients can Samba reasonably support?

David A. Titzer

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Feb 27, 1997, 3:00:00 AM2/27/97

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I've been asked this question, and can't give anybody the answer.
The samba server in question would be at least a Sun Sparc20,
possibly a Sun Ultra1. Even if somebody has some knowledge about
a Pentium running Linux, and sharing to PC's, I'd be interested
to know how well it performs.

Thanks.

PS: Rip off the "NoSpam_" prefix for e-mail replies.
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Stefan Nehlsen

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Feb 28, 1997, 3:00:00 AM2/28/97

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In <01bc24d0$5bcb9f40$497b...@dtitzer.unitedis.com> "David A. Titzer" <NoSpam_...@UnitedIS.COM> writes:

>I've been asked this question, and can't give anybody the answer.
>The samba server in question would be at least a Sun Sparc20,
>possibly a Sun Ultra1. Even if somebody has some knowledge about
>a Pentium running Linux, and sharing to PC's, I'd be interested
>to know how well it performs.

me too :*)

We have to set up a new Fileserver for our PC-users. The machine
should also do NFS, run a Webserver and maybe be our new
Mailserver.

We are planning to use a Sparc 10 with 2 Processors (50MHz), 160MB Ram,
2 SCSI Controllers (, 2 Network Interfaces) and about 50GB Harddisks.

The machine should replace one of our Novell-Servers with
about 50-70 Users now and will have to handle about 200 Clients
(SMB & NFS) in the future.

What do you think?

cu, Stefan
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Stefan Nehlsen Email: s...@techfak.uni-kiel.de
Rechnerbetriebsgruppe Tel.: +49-431-77572-106 FAX: -103
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Richard Scranton

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Feb 28, 1997, 3:00:00 AM2/28/97

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For what it's worth, here's my experience with bottom-of-the-line
hardware. My clients use Samba in a Workgroup/Intranet setting, where
the same server PC runs Samba clients, a Web server, NFS, PostgreSQL,
remote PPP access, and pop3 mail. If not required to run X, all of
the above can service a group of a dozen or so users on an 8-meg
486-33 running FreeBSD.

Each smbd instance uses about 1/2 meg of memory, somewhat less once VM
has established a working set. Using an NE2000 card in the server
(rather slow PIO-mode network 10-meg ethernet card) and IDE disks,
client systems can move files around with the DOS copy command at
about 300k/second, slightly less than FTP speed, but close. A DMA or
busmaster card can nearly double that, and SCSI disks would make that
nearly a meg/second for the average case. Even with this gutless
hardware, performance is quite acceptable. The users mostly do the
admin stuff themselves via CGI scripts running on the web server.
The major application in use is WordPerfect (various releases). The
*major* attraction for me in this arrangement is the smbclient program.
I was able to write scripts started from CRON that backup selected
directories of the client PC's to the server during off-hours. As far
as support? It just sits in the corner and runs. I dial in remotely
to reboot it once a month, more out of superstition that anything else.

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scr...@ix.netcom.com

David Collier-Brown

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Mar 3, 1997, 3:00:00 AM3/3/97

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In <01bc24d0$5bcb9f40$497b...@dtitzer.unitedis.com> "David A. Titzer"
<NoSpam_...@UnitedIS.COM> writes:
> >
> > >I've been asked this question, and can't give anybody the answer.
> > >The samba server in question would be at least a Sun Sparc20,
> > >possibly a Sun Ultra1. Even if somebody has some knowledge about
> > >a Pentium running Linux, and sharing to PC's, I'd be interested
> > >to know how well it performs.

As a first approximation, at least as man users as a NFS, ftp
or web server of equivalent size...

Samba is very like ftp, with a slightly lighter-weight tcp-based
protocol (it does one less port open per file).
You can probably do a reasonable simulation by running ftp clients
from as many machines as you have, each reading a script that's full
of ``get aa; get bb'' and so on.

If you happen to have done the http sizing exercise, samba will
behave very much like a NON-disconencting httpd (ie, one which
keeps the same socket open rather than closing and opening it for
each new document).

If you have nor opportunity to have done weitehr of the
above, close your eyes and say ``about as many as nfs''.
You'll be low.

--dave
[caveat: nfs on a machine tuned for samba will be slow.
A well-tuned nfs server will be utterly pessimal for samba]
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