[Samba] Speed of Samba through VPN

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> Today, we ran a quick test which compared the volume of traffic sent 
> over the VPN connections to the central server from a client machine and 
> from my test machine. We found that the volume of data being sent and 
> received during the process of opening a shared folder, seeing the 
> contents appear, then opening a subfolder and seeing its contents appear 
> was approximately three times as much on the client machine as my test 
> one. Does anyone know why it should be the case that smb is sending and 
> receiving three times as much data to one machine using a share as another?

Are you talking about raw packet count, packet size, or just content?
If either of the former, yes, the count and total transaction size will
be larger.  Your VPN connection is probably using a much smaller MRU/MTU
than your LAN,  resulting in more overhead (packet headers, etc..)

> The test machines are both running Win2K SP4, have exactly the same VPN 
> connection settings and offline file settings (turned off for this 
> resource). The machines are at different locations using different 
> connection technologies to reach the internet - could this be effecting 
> the volume of traffic sent and received by smb?

Yes, check the MRU/MTU.