Still no solution after 5 months(!) - Transfer speed problems (oplocks?) with Samba 2.0.7 and Win2K Pro

Welsh, Armand armand.welsh at sscims.com
Tue Dec 19 19:27:59 GMT 2000


I had a similar problem, I too, used this logic.  All the workstation in the
office using windows98 worked fine.  Windows NT/2000 workstations did not
work correctly.  They were all too slow.  I tried everything.  The solution
for me, was that I was overlooking something.  The NICs.  All the
workstation had Compaq NIC, as were default installed in them, except the
winNT/2000 boxes.  Thos machines had 3COM 3c509B/C NICs, and those were the
nics having a problem.  I could do telnet/ftp/http all quickly, but lotus
notes, and samba were very, very, very slow.  I assumed the samba thing was
a timing issue with the way I had samba configured, and that notes was a
problem, with how lotus programmed their sockets.  I was wrong... dead
wrong...

What the problem turned out being, is that the Compaq NICs and the 3Com NIC
don't play well together, with large data packets, or even potentially,
fragmented packets.  Upon further investigation, I discovered, that by
simply replacing my server's NIC with a 3C509B/C (actually, it was the
euqivalent server version of the NIC), I was now able to access the data
quickly.  It was that simple.    Now a new problem does exist.  The server,
now has timing issues when talking to some the other compaq servers, that
still had compaq NICs in them, and thus authentications would fail to the
shares on occasions.  I replaced all the servers' compaq NICs with the
100Mbit server NIC from 3COM, and the problem is now gone.

-> -----Original Message-----
-> From: infernix [mailto:infernix at infernix.nl]
-> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 10:29 AM
-> To: Kenichi Okuyama
-> Cc: samba-technical at us5.samba.org
-> Subject: Re: Still no solution after 5 months(!) - Transfer speed
-> problems (oplocks?) with Samba 2.0.7 and Win2K Pro
-> 
-> 
-> Hi,
-> 
-> > information. According to your test, Windows98 is faster 
-> than Win2k,
-> > right? Then, which device drivers are you using for you 
-> '3com 3c905C
-> > NIC', on each OS? Is it from Microsoft, or is it from 3Com?
-> 
-> This is only partially true. Both OSes are very fast with 
-> FTP. Only Samba is
-> slow on Win2K. This simplifies the problem, because you can 
-> be sure that:
-> 
-> 1) There is no ovbious misconfiguration in the hardware settings
-> 2) This is not a Win2K/Win9x TCP/IP thing (otherwise it 
-> would affect FTP
-> too)
-> 3) There is no change in the smb.conf and therefore it is 
-> not evidently
-> influenced by the Samba configuration file.
-> 4) The server is apparently not to blame since it works fine 
-> in Windows 98.
-> 
-> I tried both OSes with the Windows drivers and the 3Com 
-> drivers. Made no
-> difference.
-> 
-> > If no packets were lost, then run smbd with large number of debug
-> > options ( like... 5 or 6 ... I usually use 10 ), and see 
-> the list of
-> > requests. It might simply that since Win2k is newer version of
-> > Windows, they might be simply sending lots of nasty request (^^;).
-> 
-> I already did that. The logs are retrievable:
-> http://www.infernix.nl/samba/sambalogs.infernix.tgz. Some 
-> parts of these log
-> files were already looked into, as shown in my posting. I 
-> explained some
-> other details there too.
-> 
-> > Run Samba server normally, and than look at your machine's load
-> > average using vmstat ( or anything is okey ), especially CPU load.
-> > Are you having enough CPU power? are you having enough Memory?
-> 
-> This was my first guess, but there's 128MB memory in there 
-> and its a P2-266.
-> It should by all means be fast enough. Besides, if this 
-> would be the case, I
-> would suffer bad performance in Windows 98 too.
-> 
-> > How about trying Samba-2.0.7-ja-2.1 instead of Smaba-2.0.7?
-> 
-> I am yet to try this. I will, but this is not the real 
-> solution to the
-> problem since IMHO the main branch should implement any 
-> patches/fixes for
-> this. But I will see if I can try it out tonight.
-> 
-> > What OS are you using for server? Linux?  Of which version? Did you
-> > try FreeBSD or NetBSD? Socket layers of *BSD are lot better than
-> > Linux version.
-> 
-> This is also irrelevant, because the problem only surfaces 
-> on Windows 2000
-> clients. However, fyi, I am running Debian 2.2 (Linux) with 
-> kernels 2.2.18
-> and 2.4.0-test12.
-> 
-> 
-> It's just a shame that apparently nobody is looking into 
-> this issue. This
-> isn't just a single case. I have had over 10 emails stating 
-> that they had
-> the exact same performance problem. Sigh...
-> 
-> 
-> 
-> Regards,
-> 
-> infernix
-> 
-> 




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