[Samba] Performance: Samba 3 vs. Windows 2003

[Paul Gienger]

Have you tested a non-samba protocol,  FTP perhaps?  Many ftp programs 
will give you an estimate of the speed realtime as well, fwiw, although 
they can be a little buggy at times on estimations.

Andrew Gray wrote:

>Here's a couple suggestions that we've played with.
>
>- What kernel are you running on your Samba box?  We got significantly
>better performance when we switched to 2.6.5 over 2.4.22.
>- Do you have debugging turned on in Samba?  Or anything other than log
>level = 0?  That can slow things down a fair bit as well.
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Alexander Lazarevich" <alazarev at itg.uiuc.edu>
>To: "Samba Mailing List" <samba at lists.samba.org>
>Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 3:30 PM
>Subject: [Samba] Performance: Samba 3 vs. Windows 2003
>
>
>  
>
>>Samba guru's:
>>
>>Our Samba 3 network performance is half that of Windows 2003 Server. I
>>really want to stay with samba/unix, but half the performance? I'm hoping
>>someone can point me in the right direction so we can keep using
>>samba/unix. I'll try to give as much detail without giving pages and
>>pages of benchmark numbers. If someone wants to see numbers, I'll send
>>them:
>>
>>Fileserver is Dell PE2600, Dual Xeon 18GHz, 2GB memory, Gig NIC. System
>>is dual boot RHEL3-AS with an ext3 filesystem and Windows 2003 Server
>>with NTFS. The fileserving disk is a SATA-SCSI RAID enclosure. Bonnie++
>>and iozone both show that the RAID enclosure can do 80MB/sec writes and
>>40MB/sec reads on the ext3 in linux. Benchmarks in windows 2003 are very
>>similar. Why it gets faster writes than read, I don't know, and I don't
>>care right now. What I'm worried about is our samba network performance.
>>
>>Clients are Windows XP/2K/NT4 pro with all patches installed and Gig NICs.
>>All the clients can netperf to the server at 60+MB/sec, some even faster.
>>No collisions on the NICs, nothing wrong with the network. There is a
>>cisco Gig switch inbetween the client and the server as well.
>>
>>Here is the bottom line:
>>
>>When the server is running samba 3, the clients get 12-13MB/sec.
>>
>>When the server is running windows 2003, the clients get 24-26MB/sec.
>>
>>Keep in mind the server hardware is exactly the same, the only thing I
>>change is the software. Windows 2003 beets up Samba 3, hands down.
>>
>>However, all this testing is done by just drag and drop, and looking at
>>the clock to time it. Not the best way to do it, but I don't know of
>>another way now, suggestions welcome. The difference is obvious and
>>consistent: 500MB file in samba 3 writes to disk in 42 seconds, but writes
>>to windows 2003 disk in 21 seconds. I can produce the same results on all
>>of our clients any time of the day.
>>
>>I've tried changing the smb.conf socket options (TCP_NODELAY, SO_SNDBUF,
>>etc.) to 65523, 242xxx, whatever. /etc/init.d/smb restart, then try again.
>>No change in performance whatsoever. Still 12-13MB/sec. I've also set
>>other options in smb.conf, such as xmit, write size, read size, but
>>nothing seems to change the fact that samba 3 can't do more than
>>12-13MB/sec.
>>
>>I've also searched the list, and found some people had success in
>>performance issues by changing the SO_SNDBUF, but they didn't list any
>>benchmark numbers. Maybe they were happy with 12-13MB/sec, but I'm not,
>>especially if something else can get 25MB/sec.
>>
>>Any input is welcome.
>>
>>Alex
>>---                                                               ---
>>   Alex Lazarevich | Systems Administrator | Imaging Technology Group
>>    Beckman Institute | University of Illinois | www.itg.uiuc.edu
>>---                                                               ---
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>    
>>
>
>  
>

-- 
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