We have been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 for several years. The file server is an Opteron processor, 2GB ram and sata drive in a Raid 1 for the Solidworks data. That is the only thing the computer is used for and it is an internal network with no outside access so no firewalls or antivirus.
It takes us about 4 minutes to open a representative assembly with about 1500 unique parts over our 1Gb network from a win7 x64 box, core I7, 16GB ram, SSD. Messing around I tried loading the same model from another win7 computer (about a generation older) with SSD. Well it took about 2 min to load the same file.
I figured the SSD was the main reason for the change but then I installed Ubuntu and Debian and was back to 4-5 minutes with the same hardware. I was surprised because I always assumed Linux/Samba would be faster than Windows.
Another issue is that if we try to open the assembly read-only because somebody already has it open, it takes liek 3-4 times longer. Yet when I tried that on the Win 7 to Win 7 it was only about 50% slower.
Any thoughts or experiences.
MechEng2112