Poor Samba throughput on 6.0

[Joao Barros]

On 11/9/05, Michael Vince <mv at roq.com> wrote:
> 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

3 years ago I had a linux machine with a less powerfull cpu maxing out
the interface with SMB transfers. In all available enviroments under a
100mbit switch I can max out the interfaces using Windows or Linux.
On my particular enviroment (a 3com switch at home) I can max out the
interfaces doing transfers between my laptop and my home pc, both
running XP.


--
Joao Barros