Samba is a suite of Unix applications that speak the SMB/CIFS protocol to serve files to
a plethora of heterogeneous operating systems and hardware platforms. In this study, we
analyze two workloads to gain insight on message exchanges and resource usage
patterns. One is that of a simple interactive "rename" operation; its trace allows us to see
the typical message exchanges between a Linux Samba server and a Windows NT client.
The other is that of the well-known NetBench benchmark which measures throughput
and response time with a simulated set of typical Win32 application scripts. We use
Linux system call tracing facilities and Samba logging features to characterize the
workload in terms of file system pathnames, system calls, and traffic patterns. This
technique and insight allows the proper planning and monitoring of Samba servers which
are becoming more popular in modern-day corporate computing environments.
By: T. Paul Lee
Published in: RJ10244 in 2002
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