I think you are seeing the result of CPU overhead more than disk speed.
Compared to FTP, Appletalk and SMB/CIFS use a great deal of resources. I,
too, have a Q800 with 40Mb of RAM, and I have observed this as well. (Of
course, I'm running 1.4.1 instead of 1.5) I have some reasonably quick
drives (5200RPM) in the system, and I have seen similar figures. I think the
problem is that Appletalk shares and Samba shares are designed to be mounted
as filesystems, not merely file tranfers. The resultant locking and conflict
resolution code probably means they will always be slower than FTP,
regardless of platform.

Seth Henry
jshenry@net-noise.com

-----Original Message-----
From: port-mac68k-owner@netbsd.org
[mailto:port-mac68k-owner@netbsd.org]On Behalf Of Kadari Mayson
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 3:19 PM
To: port-mac68k@netbsd.org
Subject: Netatalk speed over IP


On my home network, I have an Apple Quadra 800 with 45 megs running
NetBSD 1.5 (beautifully I might add), which I use for my fileserver. I
have Netatalk running on it for my Macs as well as Samba for my PCs. No
conflicts. Taking into account that the Quadra only has 10BT onboard and
a slow 3400(3600?) SCSI HD, transfer speeds to and from the server never
goes about ~50k/sec. This is VERY strange since I can ftp into that
machine and I have gotten as high as 200k/sec. I realize that AppleShare
isn't really designed for high speed file transfers expecially over IP,
and even Apple considers it a legacy technology, but shouldn't I be
getting much faster transfer speeds? FTPing out from the box to
apache.org or whatever, I can get speeds as high as 200k/sec, but I
guess there is a bottleneck because of the HD speed (I can get as high
as 350-450k/sec on newer computers). Is this normal or am I doing
something wrong?

/km