CIFS read-ahead

[Nicholas M. Kirsch]

> Is it likely that multiple clients will request the same data? If that is
> the case, won't the server cache help you deliver better performance?
>
> Of course, once enough clients are asking for enough files, or the total
> file size is larger than the cache (and FreeBSD has some limitations in
> that area ATM), then you are back to reading from disk/iSCSI or wherever.

I agree a cache is very helpful -- however I am specifically interested in
improving single-stream cached performance -- so the disk is not a
bottleneck in this case.

> CIFS is a request response protocol and I believe that the redirector is
> synchronous, in that it will not initiate read requests in an async
> fashion. The best you can do is push the read block size up to the max,
> and I am not sure if Windows supports that. The max is 128kB per read.

Hmm. This seems to be my limiting factor. I will research in this area.

Thank you very much for your help.

Nick