Poor Samba throughput on 6.0

[Michael Vince]

Joao Barros wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Last month I started a thread[1] on current@ about this, but I guess I
>should have done it here, my apologies for that.
>
>After my initial post I did some more testing and I'm going to start
>clean here with all my findings :)
>
>I started with Samba 3 installed on a PIII 733MHz with fxp (82559) and
>a RAID5 consisting of 4 drives connected to an amr.
>Performance reading or writing was poor, around 5.5MB/s measured on
>two Windows clients and iostat never topped that by much.
>cpu was mbufs were available and there were no IRQs shared.
>To dismiss the amr out of the question I tried with a local IDE
>attached yielding the same results.
>I then tested the same on a machine I have at work, an HP Proliant
>server, Pentium 4 3.06GHz, used SMP instead of GENERIC to use HTT.
>I could get 8MB/s with 2 read or write simultaneous operations. With 1
>operation I still can only get 6MB/s
>This machine has 1GB ram and after copying a 700MB file to it it was all cached.
>A copy to dev/null took 1 second.
>A copy via samba took the same time as if there was no cache for it.
>iostat always showed 0.0 during the operation so that pretty much
>takes disks, controllers, IO out of the picture.
>
>Both machines have cpu, IO and mbufs to spare and they still can't use
>them. Why?
>
>
>[1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2005-October/057116.html
>
>--
>Joao Barros
>_______________________________________________
>  
>
Sometime in the near future I will be building a Samba3 server and I 
plan to get everything I can get out of it, I expect to uncover a lot of 
needed tweaks to get it going fast.
My guess would be to you try at least turning on polling, also if its 
only 100mbit Ethernet/switches you got then I guess you cant expect much 
either.

Mike