In our 1980s networking research, we came across this: a 1988 paper out of the National University of Singapore where Gee-Swee Poo and Tiow-Seng Tan benchmarked the file server performance of 3Com 3Plus, Novell Advanced Netware 286, and IBM PC Network, all running on IBM PC ATs (plus the dedicated 3Com 3Server thrown in for comparison). They hammered each setup with up to 15 workstations doing reads+writes at varying block sizes and recorded the results.
Novell came out ahead on raw performance, however the researchers had stability issues with it: “Network Error on Server” messages and giving wildly uneven response times across stations. IBM’s PC Network was the slowest of the bunch but, ironically, the most stable. The 3Com setups landed in the middle, with the 3Server occasionally freezing with an “ETH TRAP 370B” message. The big takeaway, which still feels relevant today: file server performance had basically nothing to do with network topology, baseband vs broadband, or raw line rate (10 Mbps vs 2 Mbps), it was almost entirely about the quality of the server software.
The authors closed by noting that with the Intel 80386 on the horizon, hardware was clearly going to keep racing ahead of what the file-serving software could actually use..
