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

[Welsh, Armand]

oops.. I mean 3C905B/C where ever you I type 3C509B/C... sorry for the
mixup..

-> -----Original Message-----
-> From: Welsh, Armand 
-> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2000 11:28 AM
-> To: 'infernix'; 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
-> 
-> 
-> 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
-> -> 
-> -> 
->