Need help with sysutils/fusefs-smbnetfs

[Mikhail T.]

Hello!

I've recently become a user, and then the maintainer of the 
fuse-smbnetfs port. With the mount_smbfs becoming increasingly obsolete, 
the port seems like the only solution for accessing Windows shares from 
a FreeBSD system.

The problem is very poor performance. The software uses Samba's 
libsmbclient and thus should be capable of throughput comparable to that 
of smbclient. Unfortunately, the same files I can get here at about 
20MB/second with smbclient, can only be accessed at about 500KB/s with 
smbnetfs.

If I use the "direct_io" flag to mount, the read bandwidth jumps to 
5-8MB/s, which represents an impressive gain, but is still far below 
smbclient's performance.

The very fact, that the "direct_io" flag makes such a profound 
difference, made me think, the software's interface with our FUSE 
implementation may be at fault...

The upstream developer primarily works with Linux -- and is not very 
responsive at any rate. Can any of the FreeBSD's FUSE-developers take a 
look at the port -- the codebase is not very large -- and suggest any 
optimizations?

Feel free to contact me directly with any ideas and/or patches.

Thank you. Yours,

    -mi