How to measure the performance of a file server

Question

I need a basic file server for my father's enterprise. The computer which I will be using is old and I need to take advantage of all resources to maximum. I would like to do a study comparing the performance of some solutions (Filezilla, Wing FTP, Serv-U...).

Which aspects should I study? How can I measure the performance of each program?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Really, it doesn't make any difference. Your limiting factors for file serving are IO. Disk or network.

Protocol overhead makes a difference in some cases too.

But the implementation of that protocol is unlikely to be a bottleneck.

If you really want to benchmark it, then what you need to do is look at the workload you'll be using. Are you transferring big files or little ones? Is transfer speed of individual files significant, or is it sustained throughput?