Performance Optimizations for Samba on Linux

[Jeremy Allison]

Benjamin Suto wrote:
> 
> You mentioned some performance optimizations with Samba under Linux
> 2.2.x
> 
> My apologies if this information is easily accessible, but I've been
> looking to tune the performance of a 100+ user poweredge Samba server we
> have here.  It also does web serving, Email serving, POP3, etc.
> 
> We've run into a case where we ran out of file handles..  Is there an
> easy way to fix this?
> 
> What about the file system cache, etc.?

I'm CC:ing this reply to the general Samba list
and also the Samba Technical list (in the hope
that Mindcraft might read it and learn how to 
tune a Linux system for a NetBench benchmark :-).

a). Increase the number of available files and inodes
by doing the following commands :

This is what I did at PC Week - I set these values
to 6000 open files and 12000 inodes in memory by doing :

(For the 2.0.x kernel)
echo "6000" >/proc/sys/kernel/file-max
echo "12000" >/proc/sys/kernel/inode-max

(For the 2.2.x kernel)
echo "6000" >/proc/sys/fs/file-max
echo "12000" >/proc/sys/fs/inode-max

in the rc.local file so that this is set at bootup time.
Set those to the max number of files you expect the system
to have open at once, and tune the inodes in memory to
match.

b). What will give the most performance benefit is to tell
Linux to use most of main memory for file cache and to
keep it in memory for a long time. To do this add the line :

echo "80 500 64 64 80 6000 6000 1884 2" >/proc/sys/vm/bdflush

to your rc.local. This tells Linux to use 80% of memory
for file system cache and to keep it around for as long
as possible. On the PC Week system this made the biggest
difference.

Cheers,

	Jeremy Allison,
	Samba Team.

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