Subject: [netatalk-admins] Doing Benchmarks (help for tips, tricks, suggestions)

From: Harry Zink <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 13:43:35 -0800

Preamble:
At the company I work with, we've been looking for a viable server 
solution for a while for our Macintosh support environment. We've run a 
crappy Mac (Performa 630) with personal file sharing for a while, with 
terrible stability.

We've had a meeting the other day, examing alternate solutions, and 
decided on doing a 'shoot-out' between the various solutions. Currently 
selected are: Windows NT with Macintosh services, Windows NT using the 
DAVE 2.0 client, AppleShare IP 5.0x - and I want to throw a Netatalk 
system into this as well to show that Linux/Netatalk *IS* a viable 
alternative. One of the department's directors generally just smiles, and 
discards anytime I bring up UNIX/Linux based solutions... but mostly I 
want to be able to really put netatalk to the test, and possibly even get 
us all some real-world benchmarks as a result.

Playing Field:
Mac server will be a G3, 64 megs of RAM, with UltraSCSI card, and drives, 
and 10/100 baset-T ethernet card, AppelShare IP 5.0x.

PC will be a compaq with 200MHz Pentium Pro, running Windows NT 4.0 
server.

For the Linux box, I have a 233 Cyrix motherboard, with 1 meg cache, 128 
megs of RAM, a FAST SCSI card, an IDE drive, and a SCSI drive - running 
Red Hat 5.0.

Crieria - all systems need to be able to serve over IP.

The tests:
We will be using several different files - large, single files (300 megs 
or more), as well as large folders, with tons of small files (around 300 
megabytes).

We will be doing transfer tests from 5 different Macintosh workstations 
simultaneously, during peak times, on a loaded network (12 noon, and 9 
AM), as well as on a dedicated loop with no other network traffic - so we 
get best case, and worst case.

So, I'm asking, since I've read about various problems (notably the 
trash-can issue), if any of you can contribute special hints, tips, 
tricks, configuration information (even concerning motherboards and 
hardware, as I'm willing to out on a limb here), but this is THE 
opportunity to demonstrate what this platform, and netatalk can do.

Thanks for all your help.

Harry