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View Full Version : Is SAMBA faster than the native Windows protocol?


PryGuy
August 30th, 2006, 03:40 PM
I've got a feeling that SAMBA is faster than the native "File and Printer Sharing" protocol released under Windows when I moved my file server to Ubuntu! Am I right?
jdong
August 30th, 2006, 03:45 PM
I've felt that on my home systems, too.... When working with Samba, shares connect faster and even at times transfer faster. I have always been careful not to draw the conclusion that samba is more efficient than windows's SMB support, as Microsoft works quite hard to optimize SMB... perhaps it's misconfiguration on my end.

But I am not surprised that samba feels faster than windows file sharing.
Terracotta
August 30th, 2006, 03:47 PM
I've felt that on my home systems, too.... When working with Samba, shares connect faster and even at times transfer faster. I have always been careful not to draw the conclusion that samba is more efficient than windows's SMB support, as Microsoft works quite hard to optimize SMB... perhaps it's misconfiguration on my end.

But I am not surprised that samba feels faster than windows file sharing.
I think MS has recognised that samba implemented its protocol better than MS did themselves. (Considering the samba had to reverse engineer everything, not bad).

Edit: typo
PryGuy
August 30th, 2006, 03:47 PM
And I'll say it again, UBUNTU RULES!!!:D
jdong
August 30th, 2006, 03:50 PM
Also don't forget that Linux has one of the best networking stacks, and disk cache systems... all around Linux delivers top-notch computing performance.
PryGuy
August 30th, 2006, 03:51 PM
I will add that the Active Directory worked slow as hell for me too. I know it's for big companies and all, but it was swapping like a madman without any users connected so it was impossible to work on my 1.7GHz 512Mb server.
jdong
August 30th, 2006, 04:06 PM
It's always surprised me how much lower linux's hardware requirements are compared to Windows. Case and point, two years back I bought an extremely cheap Celeron M laptop, which came with XP. XP is virtually unusably slow on the system, even for simple web browsing and word processing.

Right now, I have it dual-booting Kubuntu and it feels just as responsive as my core duo laptop.