Samba vs. NFS: Performance [closed]

Hello fellow NSLU2 user. I would definitely go for NFS, unless there were some compelling reasons (namely Windows machines). NFS is more light-weight and faster.

As for the NSLU2 side, you will find that tweaking the NFS options and choosing the right filesystem for the shared disk are important. I have chosen ext3 but then switched to ext2 as it seemed to consume less of the precious resources. When using wireless don't expect extraordinary performance and don't use too big block size, otherwise go for huge blocks.

In either case there are some parameters to tweak. Do some benchmarks on your own and decide which options are the best (TCP/UDP, rsize, wsize, etc) for example for NFS here is some old comparison: NSLU2 NFS

Last but not least - it would be nice to see your results - to learn from them ;)

The main benefit I can think of to use SAMBA is that is supports SMB file shares to windows boxes. If you want to connect to this with only a another unix box, then NFS will likely perform better.