I was disappointed by the speed of file transfer.
So I ran a few tests to see which way is best.
Note that my big server machine is called liberte;
the WD NetCenter 250GB is called wdnetcenter.
The times are obtained from Linux time command.
I installed the unslung rsync ipkg.

Bottom line is: the netcenter is indeed slow;
the network speed is fine for TCP (no clue why udp is so
bad). Best performance gives plain old ftp transfers.
I can recommend the use of rsync which is better than simple fixed nfs mounts. nfs via autofs is disastrous for me.

Here are the results:

[root@nslu2 geert]$ netio -t 192.168.0.250

NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.23
(C) 1997-2003 Kai Uwe Rommel

TCP connection established.
Packet size 1k bytes: 9541 KByte/s Tx, 9992 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 2k bytes: 10200 KByte/s Tx, 11668 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 4k bytes: 10830 KByte/s Tx, 11671 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 8k bytes: 11656 KByte/s Tx, 11674 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes: 11684 KByte/s Tx, 11670 KByte/s Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes: 11677 KByte/s Tx, 11394 KByte/s Rx.
Done.

[root@nslu2 geert]$ netio -u 192.168.0.250

NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.23
(C) 1997-2003 Kai Uwe Rommel

UDP connection established.
Packet size 1k bytes: 9560 KByte/s (17%) Tx, 12 KByte/s (96%) Rx.
Packet size 2k bytes: 11646 KByte/s (0%) Tx, 10 KByte/s (0%) Rx.
Packet size 4k bytes: 11817 KByte/s (0%) Tx, 26995 Byte/s (0%) Rx.
Packet size 8k bytes: 11812 KByte/s (0%) Tx, 10053 Byte/s (0%) Rx.
Packet size 16k bytes: 11807 KByte/s (0%) Tx, 24149 Byte/s (0%) Rx.
Packet size 32k bytes: 11633 KByte/s (1%) Tx, 11031 Byte/s (0%) Rx.
Done.


What's going on here! I don't trust the 26 and 24 MB/s values.
Wait! They are Bytes not KBytes.

(from liberte to wdnetcenter)


10MB cp to /mnt/nfs/wdnetcenter: 500 kBytes/s
10MB cp to /mnt/samba/wdnetcenter: 2.5 MBytes/s
1GB cp file to /mnt/samba/wdnetcenter 2.4 MBytes/s
1GB cp to /mnt/NFS/wdnetcenter 3.0 MBytes/s
1GB cp to /mnt/SAMBA/wdnetcenter 2.4 MBytes/s
1GB rsync to rsync (daemon) 3.2 MBytes/s
10MB ftp 6.3 MBytes/s
1GB ftp 5.9 MBytes/s


(default rsize/wsize of 1024; enlarged rsize/wsize to 8192 shows no difference)
(mount -t smbfs //wdnetcenter/Shared\ Files /mnt/SAMBA/wdnetcenter
asks for password; use root's)

Conclusion:

ftp is fastest
rsync is pretty good too
fixed mounted nfs is not too bad
samba is a good fourth
nfs (but not samba) via autofs slows things down a lot!

-----------------------
Geert