CIFS? Really?

CIFS? Really?

Posted Feb 15, 2007 6:08 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)
In reply to: CIFS? Really? by drag
Parent article: Why a secret patent deal won't help Linux/Windows (LinuxWorld)

sshfs when you manually request blowfish works okay, but at a pretty high cpu cost. It frsutrates me for lan usage that the OpenSSH people refuse to support the 'none' cipher, because sshfs would be much more competitive.

However sshfs is VASTLY inferior in the realm of cacheing to both CIFS and NFS. A repeated ls with a minute of pause can incur significant lag with sshfs, wheras nfs or cifs will leave it instantaneous. Also while NFS and CIFS may be very unpleasant in handling the restoration of client/server connectivity, sshfs simply fails entirely.

sshfs also does not support the full range of file semantics without error. Try mmapping in a few large files from sshfs, and your program will likely encounter mysterious stalls which do not recover.

That said, for many use cases sshfs is by far the best choice. It has far more sane permission handling, and the lack of need to specially configure the server is fantastic. Error reporting is clear and accessible, and peformance is quite livable for very small files, low access, and low bandwidth.

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