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

[Greg Dickie]

If you are using Cisco equipment verify the settings on both ends. CISCO
does NOT autonegociate well at all!

Greg


On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Welsh, Armand wrote:

> Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 11:27:59 -0800
> From: "Welsh, Armand" <armand.welsh at sscims.com>
> To: 'infernix' <infernix at infernix.nl>,
>      Kenichi Okuyama <okuyamak at dd.iij4u.or.jp>
> 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
> -> 
> -> 
> 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Dickie
just a guy
greg at discreet.com