[Samba] Samba transfer rate slower than ftp

Francois Lepretre flsamba at quad.fr
Wed Jun 23 04:26:04 MDT 2010


Hello,

I have a file server under Debian Lenny, with a 41TB file system (XFS, 
24 x 2TB hard drives on RAID 6 on an Areca card)

Reading files with ftp works like a charm and we easily reach the 125 
MB/s limit of the GB ethernet card.

But when reading files (on the same clients) from a samba share, we get 
around 60 MB/s.
Clients are Windows XP 64 and Seven 64 and show the same performances.

Sadly enough, this server has a 'twin brother' (same hardware) that runs 
Windows Server 2008, and reading from a share on it gives a nice 100MB/s.


So why is the samba share so 'slow' compared to ftp or the windows server ?

Here is the smb.conf (samba version is 3.2.5)

-------------------------------------------------------------
[global]

    workgroup = WIZZ
    server string = Prod1 File Server %v
    log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
    max log size = 50
    security = share
    encrypt passwords = yes
    socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 
SO_SNDBUF=8192
    dns proxy = no
    guest account = root
    load printers = no
    printing = bsd
    printcap name = /dev/null
    disable spoolss = yes
    getwd cache = yes
    dead time = 30

[partage]
    comment = Partage
    browseable = yes
    writable = yes
    path = /space/partage
    guest ok = yes

------------------------------------------------------------

I have also tried without any socket options, or with the following options
   socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY IPTOS_THROUGHPUT 
SO_RCVBUF=262142 SO_SNDBUF=262142 SO_SNDLOWAT SO_RCVLOWAT
   min receivefile size=16384
   use sendfile = true
   aio read size = 1
   aio write size = 1

but this did not give any improvement.


Any ideas ?


Thanks


Francois


More information about the samba mailing list