well, first of all, NFS will preserve user and group ownership of the
files, as well as ALL the file attributes. with samba, you only get the
owner and the time stamp, I don't think you get any group attributes.

For performance, all I can offer is a testimonial. I was about to
reinstall windows 98, back in the bad old days when I still had a windows
machine at all. I had set up samba to do drive share. I ended up with a
large .zip file I wanted to save before reinstalling, so I started copying
it to one of the drive shares that were on my linux machine. The file was
big, I think a couple hundred megabytes. I started doing other stuff, then
after a while started wondering why it was still copying. I watched the
rate the data was getting to my linux machine, then calculated it would
take 10 hours!! so then I installed an ftp client and ftp'd the file
in 10 minutes (i have a 100mb ethernet). granted, I'm no samba expert,
so perhaps the samba setup on my linux box wasn't optimal.

My seat of the pants comparison of nfs vs. ftp is that ftp is faster,
but certainly not 60 times faster than nfs.

On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 09:56:36AM -0700, Kurt Granroth wrote:
> On Friday 16 August 2002 08:16 am, Kevin Geiss wrote:
> > Definitely use NFS for file sharing! It is much higher performance than
> > samba.
> 
> Do you know of any research or papers that back up this subject?  I've been 
> trying off-and-on for the past few months to find ANY reason to use NFS 
> over SMB and cannot find one.  I keep hearing that NFS is "better" in this 
> way or that.. but no actual proof of it.
> 
> Surely there must be *some* tests done comparing the two...
> -- 
> Kurt Granroth - "KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop"
> KDE Developer/Evangelist | granroth@kde.org
> http://www.granroth.org  | kurt@granroth.org
> 
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