3 ms·

Well, SMB worked a decade ago and still does. Main difference is that it works better on local networks.

• acdha 8y ago
  “Works” in the sense that the experience is acceptable but anyone who's used it knows that while things have gotten a little better over the years there are still a wide range of programs which handle latency by blocking. If you use a network home directory, you just get used to Outlook, Word, etc. sporadically hanging for a few seconds before the UI paints, etc. That's going to be worse as a function of latency and packet loss so it's far more tolerable in an enterprise environment using wired networks with tons of bandwidth and, at least theoretically, a professional support team. Over WiFi or consumer-grade internet (i.e. probably a strong majority of Dropbox's customers) the gap in experience is going to be more substantial.
  • gsich 8y ago
    I am not sure if SMB is used over the Internet by "customers".
    • acdha 8y ago
      It's heavily used over VPNs. I have seen SMB over the internet by [ill-advised] companies but the various waves of exploits have probably put an end to that. The main point was just that something like SMB or NFS is not a good fit for a network which is not extremely fast and highly reliable because too many programs do blocking I/O. Dropbox works really well in that situation because it's asynchronous and that advantage was huge when they came out because everything was even worse back in 2007.
      • gsich 8y ago
        I wrote "customers", not in the sense of "companies". With the later ones I get paid to wait if I have to use SMB.