NAS Performance: NFS vs. SMB vs. SSHFS

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2022-01-22 04:30:03

This is a performance comparison of the the three most useful protocols for networks file shares on Linux with the latest software. I have run sequential and random benchmarks and tests with rsync. The main reason for this post is that i could not find a proper test that includes SSHFS.

The hardware side of the server is based on an Dell mainboard with an Intel i3-3220, so a fairly old 2 core / 4 threads CPU. It also does not support the AES-NI extensions (which would increase the AES performance noticeably) the encryption happens completely in software.

As storage two HDDs in BTRFS RAID1 were used, it does not make a difference though, because the tests are staged to hit almost always the cache on the server, so only the protocol performance counts.

Everything was tested over a local Gigabit Ethernet Network. The client is a quadcore desktop machine running Arch Linux, so this should not be a bottleneck.