Subject: [netatalk-admins] 8.5 and asun

From: [email-masked] (Lee Blevins)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 06:33:30 -0500

I'm not seeing any speed difference when using 8.5 to copy to the
netatalk server. 

I tried it on a 8100/110 using an Asante 100 mb card.

The computer has two hard drives so I loaded the os on the other. 

I boot it under 8.1 and I get about 20 seconds to send a 40 meg file.
Under 8.5, it's the same.

Is the current netatalk+asun taking advantage of the "improved" speed
I'm hearing about or is this "improved" speed more fiction than fact?

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From: Stelios Valavanis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 10:55:07 -0600

>I'm hearing about or is this "improved" speed more fiction than fact?

i assume you used ashareIP instead of normal appletalk to connect. anyway
i'm just excited that the alias breaking problem is now fixed! have you
guys seen that? 

  _________________________________________________________
    stel valavanis     mailto:[email-masked]     http://www.onShore.com/

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From: [email-masked] (Abel Deuring)
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 23:00:00 +0000

[email-masked] wrote

> I'm hearing about or is this "improved" speed more fiction than fact?

Trying to carry out speed tests on the basis of simply copying a  
file is somewhat questionable. This involves not only the speed  
of the network part of the Mac OS but also the speed of the hard  
disks (both client and server), the quality of the network  
cables, the quality of the hub or switch, performance of the  
server hardware and probably some other things I had the luck not  
to get involved with.

I don't have an exact answer to your question but the following  
might give you an idea how complex things can be.

Last weekend, I was able to make some performance tests with a  
Sun Enterprise 450, 256 MB RAM, Solaris 2.6, three "striped" 18  
GB Barracudas, mirrored to another three Barracudas, Helios  
EtherShare 2.6, and a Linux Server (HP Server - I-dont-know-which- 
type-exactly -, Pentium II 333(?) MHZ, 96 MB RAM, RAID-SCSI- 
controller with five 7200 rpm IBM disks in RAID 0 mode), running  
netatalk-1.4b2+asun-2.1.0-5 and SuSe Linux 5.3.

Running Helios Lantest on a recently delivered G3 Mac (I think it  
has MacOS 8.1 installed but I'm not sure...) with a 100 MBit  
Kingston card showed generally similar results both for the Sun/ 
Helios machine and the Linux/Netatalk box: read and write  
transfer rates between 8 and 10 MB/s; the other parameters tested  
by Helios Lantest were also nearly equal.

Helios Lantest is a - very useful - synthetic test, but it  
measures only the performance of the "network parts" of the  
client machine and the server (assuming the server is able to  
cache 3 resp. 30 MB of hard disk data), so I added another test:  
To copy a "folder hierachy" containing around 190 MB from/to the  
servers. The results surprised me: copying from/to the Linux  
machine needed between 2:10 and 2:30 minutes while the sun needed  
2:50 ... 3:xx minutes. (times simply taken with a wrist-watch,  
figures recalled from memory - I'm writing this mail from home  
while the results are written down in the office. If there is  
interest in it, I can post the exact figures)

So, while the "simple" Helios Lantest showed really good results  
for both servers, the results of the "real" performance tests are  
quite disillusionizing: 190 MB in 130 .. 180 seconds means a  
transfer rate of 1 .. 1.5 MB/s - and the far cheaper Linux/ 
Netatalk machine did a better job than the Sun. (The conclusion  
that it would be generally useless to use a Sun or HP or what  
ever machine instead of a Linux server would nevertheless be  
wrong - but that's a different discussion, involving the over all  
performance of the hardware, what you need the hardware for,  
availability of software packages, quality of support - for my  
experience, newsgroups and mailing lists like this one are often  
far better than commercial support -, availability of bug fixes  
and many other things.)

I also run a low budget server (Linux/Netatalk/Samba P120 with  
"cheap surroundings"), but it is used for special purposes - as a  
reliable RIP (the combination of Ghostscript with Netatalk and  
Samba is in the daily business far better than some commercial  
bullshit), and as a seldom used image archive server. It is not  
expected to be a high end server. Helios Lantest read/write gets  
around 4-5 MB/sec; a simple copy command from/to its Quantum  
Bigfoot image achive disks would probably give lousy results.

To come to an end: Try to isolate your problem. Look out for (or  
write :) a program like Helios Lantest which generates data on a  
client instead of copying the data from/to the client's hard  
disk. Check the configuration of your client. Check your server  
hardware: network card, speed of hard disks, speed/quality of the  
SCSI (or IDE?) controller, of the network card, of your hub/ 
switch and of your cabling (can be really nasty work, the  
latter...).

Abel