Any idea why Sharity-Light is at least 3X faster than smbfs here?

[jason]

Doug Lee wrote:

>I'm running FreeBSD 4.10-STABLE on a P166 and trying to copy very
>large (but under 4 gig) files from FreeBSD to a Windows 98 (Second
>Edition) P866 machine.  Neither machine has much other load.  (The
>FreeBSD version probably doesn't matter; I've seen this on many 4.x
>revisions in the same hardware configuration.  My network is 100BaseTX
>Ethernet and uses a hub, though during this test there are no machines
>on the LAN other than these two.  I only see a few packet collisions
>per minute on the dc0 interface of the FreeBSD machine, which is the
>interface on this LAN and which produces the following info at boot
>time:
>
>dc0: <ADMtek AN985 10/100BaseTX> port 0xfc00-0xfcff mem 0xffbefc00-0xffbeffff irq 10 at device 20.0 on pci0
>miibus0: <MII bus> on dc0
>ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> on miibus0
>ukphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
>
>Anomaly:  Contrary to Sharity-Light docs, which say smbfs is faster,
>A Win98 share as just described accepts data about three times faster
>if mounted via shlight than if mounted via smbfs.  I'm wondering if
>anyone knows why.  (For comparison, I believe ftp moves about two
>times even faster than shlight.)
>
>Please Cc me directly.
>
>Thanks very much for any input.
>
>  
>
I have done smbfs mounts on win xp and its slow for me too.  Transfers 
to xp are horrifically slow!  I had just 2 machines(the ones doing the 
transfer) on the switched 100base T network at the time.  Last time I 
attempted a smbfs was a earlier this year on a box running current or 5.2.1.