Apple to apple networked drives

Now all the client machines at work are macs I have a choice of protocols to share my network drives over.

I've got AFP, SMB and NFS services available on the servers. What is likely to be the best performer? The machine serves out DV quality video files to a dozen clients out of folders containing thousands of files. A swift google hasn't really turned up anything.

Found this thread discussing it:
http://www.serverelements.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=5602

Seems to say with a server running NasLite-2, the OS X clients saw similar peformance with SMB and AFP, and also good NFS read speed. For some reason though NFS write speed was bad. I'd say if it is an all Mac enviornment, use AFP if the server also deals with all the characters OS X allows above SMB limits. That way there won't be any file naming issues.

ISTR the old problem with NFS write speed was that the server was required by spec to only report a completed write once it had actually been written to disk - not any disk cache. That was back on NFSv2, anyway...

Hugo

Quote:
ISTR the old problem with NFS write speed was that the server was required by spec to only report a completed write once it had actually been written to disk - not any disk cache. That was back on NFSv2, anyway...

On Linux, this is now controllable via the "sync" and "async" NFS mount options. Use "sync" for slow, guaranteed-to-be-written access; use "async" for fast report-back-once-you've-got-it-cached accesses.