Performance tuning a samba system

[Andreas Vierengel]

Indeed Novell is an optimised System for fileserving, and my personal opinion is, that novell is faster than samba. But consider Novell has also good (perfomance optimised) Clients. With samba on your server you use the microsoft client on you WinX-machines (which is not fast in comparison to novell client). Also the TCP-Parameters in Win95 are really a mess. In fact they use a MTU which is too small (if you use Ethernet), no Recieve windows, etc.
My first experience with the performance of samba / win95 was really bad. About 1.2MB/s with a 100MBit/s Ethernet for sending or receiving data.
Therefore I tuned my win95 and samba.
For windows95 try the programm MTU-Speed (I've forgotten the link, but you should find it at www.tucows.com ). Set the MTUsize to 1500 bytes. And set the maximum receive window.
On the samba side, test the various socket options like TCP_NODELAY and so on (read man page). For me it worked best, without any socket options. I have only inlcuded the read raw and write raw statements. but maybe it is completly different on your system, since i use redhat 5.1 on an ASUS-PIIL97-S  with a Celeron300A (with cache) => price/performance superior to anything else. 
What version of Solaris do you use. To tune your solaris tcp to the max, check out the following link:
http://www.rvs.uni-hannover.de/people/voeckler/tune/EN/tune.html (very good, used it to tune our SUN).

Hope that helps!


Dipl.-Inf. (FH)
Andreas Vierengel

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