More On Samba And Softupdates

[Michael Powell]

Tim Daneliuk wrote:

> The other day I mentioned I had a problem with a Samba-shared drive that
> was just installed blowing up.  When I rebuilt it, I forgot to enable
> softupdates but the drive seems to be working flawlessly.  I understand
> it is possible to do this after-the-fact with tunefs.  Some questions:
> 
>    Do I have to unmount the drive to do it?
>    What benefit will I get if I turn on softupdates?
>  
> This drive is being used as a backup drive for all the workstations on
> this particular network, and "reliable" is much more important than "
> slightly faster".

As per man tunefs:

"The tunefs utility cannot be  run on an active file system.  To change an 
active file system, it must  be downgraded to read-only or unmounted."

The benefit is not just speed, but better concurrent multi-user throughput. 
Operations which would block other I/O "finish" sooner so the next task can 
begin without waiting.

I actually run mine with aio_load="YES" in loader.conf in conjunction with 
the following in smb.conf:

	aio read size = 16384
	aio write size = 16384
	aio write behind = true
	block size = 16384
	use sendfile = Yes

Minor performance tweaks aside, should you continue to see the error(s) 
described in the other mail I sincerely suspect softupdates is not the 
culprit.

-Mike