We're using a NetBSD machine (polder) as a file server, with Samba. For
some reason, this is a lot slower than a NT machine (wormer) we also
have, and FreeBSD (purmer).  A small table might give an indication of
what sort of differences I'm talking about:

from  \  to	bijlmer	polder	purmer

wormer		 850	 830	  940
bijlmer		 785	  70	   45
polder		 120	2200	  140
purmer		 750	 720	15385

(speed in kilobytes/sec, approx, measured with smbclient copying a file
of 3.166.720 bytes (netscape.exe) to /dev/null, multiple times)

Hardware is diverse:

wormer:	 NT 3.50, Pentium 166, SCSI disks, pci ne2000 clone
bijlmer: NetBSD 1.3.2, 486 66, SCSI disk, 3c509 ethernet
polder:	 NetBSD 1.2.1, Pentium 133, SCSI disks, 3c509 ethernet
purmer:	 FreeBSD 2.2.7, AMD-K6 300, IDE disk, NE2000 PCI Ethernet
	 (RealTek 8029)

connected with a 10 Mbit/s ethernet (coax).

Note especially the incredibly low speed from bijlmer to polder, both
NetBSD. It's not the speed of the machines that ought to matter here
(although it varies wildly), since samba uses only a few %CPU, and raw
TCP speed is as expected. I also conclude that it is the server that
makes the big difference, not the client, except in the case of loopback
tests. 

Why o why is NetBSD so slow here? I am positively dieing to get rid of
that stupid NT box, it's causing so much trouble (not to mention
expenses), but it does serve files quickly...

-Olaf.
--
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert - rhialto@polder.ubc. ---- Unauthorized duplication,
\X/ .kun.nl ---- while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing.