Poor Samba throughput on 6.0

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Joao Barros wrote:

> I tried using a single drive, an IDE and a SCSI-2 and on 2 machines at 
> work both with a RAID1. Even better, there is a part in my initial email 
> where I mention that having a 700MB file cached (iostat reported no 
> reads) the results were the same. With this in mind I don't think the 
> problem is at the storage level.

My feeling is that it is likely related to the network stack -- perhaps a 
combination of Samba<->sockets and TCP<->Windows, hence pointing at things 
like TCP settings.  It would be quite interesting to know what top -S 
looks like during (perhaps two minutes into) a long-haul transfer, and the 
output of systat -vmstat 1.  I know Apple has done some work on the 
efficiency of the FreeBSD SMB client when talking to windows servers 
relating to how TCP behaves, but haven't heard anything about them looking 
at similar issues in Samba.

Robert N M Watson