[Samba] Extremely slow Samba3 performance with ArcView/WinXP

[Andreas Haumer]

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Hi All!

I would like to bring up this topic again as I still
have no solution for the problem :-(

Andreas Haumer schrieb:
> Hi!
> 
> I have a user who is running a Samba server to store data
> files for his ArcView 3.3 application. Client operating
> system is Windows XP professional.
> 
> With Samba2 (2.2.8a) this was working quite fine, it usually
> took less than a few seconds to load and render one of the
> GIS presentations with ArcView.
> 
> We then did an upgrade to Samba3 (3.0.20b) and suddenly
> the same operation now takes more than 20 seconds or even
> minutes in some cases. You can even see the picture forming
> slowly on the screen. Other applications do not suffer from
> performance problems (The new Samba3 server is a really fast
> Dual Opteron server with 4GB of RAM and a fast external U320
> RAID running under Linux-2.4.31)
> 
> I took a IP traffic dump with tcpdump and also samba logs
> with loglevel 10 and found that there are a _lot_ of small
> packets going between the WinXP client and the Samba3 server.
> 
[...]

On the Samba mailing list I have found one report describing
(exactly?) the same problem I see: very slow read performance
with ArcView (only) and Samba due to very small packets beeing
transferred (see <http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/1998-May/007244.html>)

But this report was from May 6th, 1998 for Samba-1.9.18(!)
and the solution seemingly was to set the samba configuration
parameter "socket options = TCP_NODELAY", which I already
have set (as well as "SO_RCVBUF=8192" and "SO_SNDBUF=8192",
see the listing of global configuration settings in my
original mail)

Is there anyone else out there using ArcView together with Samba3
who has the same problem or who does _not_ have this problem (so
we can compare configuration settings)?

What is different between the way ArcView uses the Samba share
compared to other applications?

What might cause ArcView to request blocks of 512 bytes only
with Samba3 (and not larger blocks of 4096 or even 32768 bytes,
as it is the case with Samba2)?

Does anyone have any idea on how to proceed?

Thanks!

- - andreas

- --
Andreas Haumer                     | mailto:andreas at xss.co.at
*x Software + Systeme              | http://www.xss.co.at/
Karmarschgasse 51/2/20             | Tel: +43-1-6060114-0
A-1100 Vienna, Austria             | Fax: +43-1-6060114-71
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