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

[Anders C. Thorsen]

On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 08:34:00PM -0500, Greg Dickie wrote:
> 
> 
> If you are using Cisco equipment verify the settings on both ends. CISCO
> does NOT autonegociate well at all!

The same goes for many 3Com Switches as well. Actually, sometimes 
(bad firmware), it might force Full duplex on a half duplex
negotiated connection. Giving _bad_ transfer rates.

--Anders
 
> 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
> 

-- 

--Anders

Anders C. Thorsen
PGP Key: http://www.aae.wisc.edu/~anders/anders-pgp.asc

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