Recent versions of Windows 10 support HTTP/2, so for this test, the “h2” protocol was disabled on the Apache server. It’s accessed from Windows Explorer by using the “Map network drive…” option and selecting “Connect to a web site that you can use to store your documents and pictures.” WebDAV Redirector is the name of the built in WebDAV client in Windows. These times are in line with expectations for a consumer grade network connection. Ping time between them is 18ms average, httping to the WebDAV server URL is 140ms average. It is running Apache Web Server 2.4.38 and Linux kernel 5.0.0-rc8. The WebDAV server is a server computer with a Intel i5-6500 CPU. For certain tests, Docker was used in Linux and the Windows 10 VM connected to it.
Windows 10 (version 1809 build 17763.348) was run as a Virtual Machine in KVM using user mode networking to connect to the Internet.
The client computer is a Dell Latitude 7490 running Fedora 29. In March 2019, testing was performed on the same client, same server, and using the same connection. We will look at seven approaches for clients to access a WebDAV share, evaluating and testing the performance of each. It was literally designed for this use case. Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) provides the same basic functionality as other file sharing protocols (such as NFS, SMB, and FTP) except it is over the familiar, widely deployed well supported HTTP protocol. Since SMB isn’t safe to run directly over the Internet (it’s usually not encrypted and it has a long history of security vulnerabilities ), potential options included tunneling SMB within a VPN or changing away from the SMB protocol. A recent migration for one our federal clients involved users running Windows 10 accessing a Windows file share using the SMB protocol (SMB is the Windows built in file sharing protocol used commonly for shared drives). Part of migrating applications from on-premises hosting to cloud hosting (AWS, Azure, etc) involves re-evaluating how users access their data.