Samba performance on FreeBSD

[Martin Welk]

Dear Samba team & other readers,

I'm a satisfied user using Samba as a file server for Windows based
networks and I'm primarily using FreeBSD for this purpose.
When I started to use Samba about half a year ago, I was upset about
the lousy performance but tried my best to search for that problem
at myself. The machine at this time as a Pentium/200 PC with some
SCSI harddisks and 64 mbyte of memory. Reading was quiet quick, but
writing to the server (especially many small files) was sooo sloooow.

In the Samba man page I found the hint to the socket option configuration
directive and read also the FreeBSD getsockopt/setsockopt(4) man page
carefully. After increasing them and setting other options I noticed
a signficant performance increase, that means, you cannot really
compare anymore if you're writing to a local disk or to a network
server during delay work.

Currently I use:

socket options = IPTOS_LOWDELAY TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=262144 SO_RCVBUF=262144

Meanwhile, some number of people use FreeBSD and also Samba and the
question why Samba is so slow appears again and again and again on
the mailing lists.

So I thought about committing a change to the FreeBSD port for Samba
(some set of Makefiles and patches that use a Samba distribution to
compile a FreeBSD binary) that way, that at least the send/receive
buffer options will become default (perhaps with a little smaller
value). It could also set as a default from the configure script
when it determines it's running on FreeBSD.

Now I wanted to ask you if there's something dangerous in doing so or a
good reason why it isn't the default yet. 

Thank you very much in advance, also for correcting me :-)

Regards,

Martin
-- 
FreibergNet Systemhaus GbR                   Martin Welk * Sales, Support
Systemhaus für Daten- und Netzwerktechnik           phone +49 3731 781387
Unternehmensgruppe Liebscher & Partner                fax +49 3731 781377
D-09599 Freiberg * Am St. Niclas Schacht 13    http://www.freibergnet.de/