What filesharing is fastest over ethernet?
 

I'm looking to strip down and lean out a particular filiesharing technology so that it runs fast as possible over ethernet. What technology is best? NFS, samba, AFS?

Bare in mind that security or other worries are not of any concern... only speed!

Between linux computers, nfs is by far the fastest, but it does not work with Windows.
I don't know about other network filesystems.

So it leaves smb in the dust huh?

NFS is almost totally built into the kernel and super-optimized. The samba project is much more concerned with support for broken Microsoft standards, than speed. (They have done a great job at this) There is no reason to use Samba and broken Microsoft protocols instead of NFS, unless you have to.

Run both servers. So if linux to linux is needed then use nfs on it. If going to or back from windows use samba.

Brian1

This is also what I do, but if you don't need samba, remove it to get better performance on NFS (more free ram and cpu time). Again, there is no way samba is faster than NFS.

It's going to be OS X, SuSE 9.3 and, Windows. I have SFU for the Windows boxen... I'm just hopping that the client is worth a damn.

Considering it's made by Microsoft, i have doubts... Seriously though, it will be a lot slower, since I doubt it is integrated in the kernel.

Well the Windows will be over the wireless lan anyway... so it'll be slow reguardless. I'm really more worried about the Linux/OSX connections.

I'm using nfs to connect both linux an osx to a fileserver over 100MBit ethernet. Throughput is around 11-11.5MB/s. It doesn't get faster than that. I'm sure there are nfs clients for windows out there.

There are.

If I remember correctly, SFU will allow you to mount an NFS share.

Not sure about performance, though.

Just because same topic is interesting me:

Is NFS better then Samba for Linux only network?

I have some problems with samba configuration so is it worth to go for NFS?

I will have to share printer also, as I understand there are separate setup for printer sharing - not via NFS. What should I use for linux printer sharing?

Yes, NFS is well worth it. Very well worth it.

As for printing, I think you can use CUPS.