continue to be installed on each PC. NFSCIFS (SMB)6 Performance IssuesNFS is available in almost as many variations as UNIX itself. Each vendor who supplies NFS as an extension to their UNIX operating system or as an add-on to work with their TCP/IP stack, generally provides an NFS solution that is optimized based on their view of how their NFS product will be used by customers. Therefore, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about the performance of NFS as a technology without discussing individual implementations. To be sure, most are adequate for the purposes of file and printer sharing. However, NFS does have some limiting characteristics regardless of vendor implementation: CIFS was developed as part of the networking architecture of the Windows operating system by Microsoft. CIFS (or SMB) has been included in all versions of Windows and has become the new standard for cross-platform connectivity. When CIFS is added to a UNIX server, all of its resources become transparently available to each PC user on the network. Using a CIFS server as opposed to NFS clients does address some of the performance limiting factors of NFS: 7 Performance Issues (continued)PC Resources: All NFS solutions require that NFS be loaded on each PC in the network. This creates a resource issue for System Administrators because very few users can install and configure NFS for themselves. Since NFS is required to run on the PC, it also affects PC system resources by requiring additional CPU cycles, memory & disk resources. PC Resources: Since no additional software is required on the PC, the system administrator's primary task is to load and configure the CIFS server on the UNIX system. In most implementations, this requires about 10-20 minutes, or roughly the time required to load NFS on a single PC. A significant difference to a system administrator with hundreds of networked PCs. While the TCP/IP network must still be configured on the PC, this...
