smbd -V on your Snow Leopard installation, you'll see it's running SAMBA version 3.0.28a-apple. While I'm not sure how much difference the "-apple" makes, version 3.0.28a is old. Very old. In other words, it's riddled with bugs. Apple hasn't updated SAMBA in 3 years, and for Lion, they're dumping it altogether for something homegrown. The reason? SAMBA is now GPLv3.To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
I use it daily at home. My photo-collection is sitting on Synology server, and I access it from all my home computers, including MacOS and Ubuntu. The slowest machine is Windows Xp, but access is fastest, i guess, because of intensive caching. So i use NFS on unix machines, it is also slow, but seems a bit faster.
I do not want to comment employer thing, it is a fud.
Agreed.
SAMBA has a long and very well documented history of stomping Microsoft at file sharing performance via SMB. Last I really looked (admittedly, some time ago), it was frequently by as much as 30% or better performance.
Saying SAMBA is slow is like saying Microsoft's own is glacial.
It's actually been my experience that the opposite is true. A Windows to Windows copy is slower than a Windows to Linux or even a Linux to Linux (though why you'd use Samba between two Linux machines, I'll never know. It's like some people I know using SMB to communicate between an IBM AS/400 and Linux. Apparently they weren't aware of NFS, or the billion other ways of setting it up.)
The reason is, probably, is that windows reserves part of the band, something about 30%, for other communications. And performance will depend from file size. It is particularly slow with small files. In our scenarios th difference would be with servers: i have slow server and fast clients, you, probably, fast server.
Actually for backups I use rsync. It is the fastest way, if you configure it correctly, and it is available on all platforms. And it uses entire band on windows.
Sorry for typos, typed on ipad.





Member since:
2006-07-26
Obviously, it is scary to rely on GPLv3, so Apple will try to replace all GPLv3 software eventually. XCode 4 uses LLVM already, dumping Gnu compilers, Samba is next. And existing Samba is damn slow, comparing with Windows built-in networking, so I'm glad it will be replaced, hope it will be faster.