Performance tips for heavily loaded servers

[david murray]

Nathan wrote, 
> Does nayone have a collection of performance tips for heavily loaded 
> samba servers?
>
> I have a server that routinely has 45-90 connections and just runs really 
> poorly. We've thrown more memory at it w/ some benefit, but not 
> significant. 
>
> This is on a linux 2.0.35 based machine.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions?
>
> -- Nathan

We have a dual P-II 333, 256MB RAM, 24GB raid-5 array being served up by
1.9.18p10 (on Linux 2.0.33).  We typically have about 70 smbd processes
floating around.  When we first installed, performance was horrible, but
it wasn't the CPU (95% idle), Memory (usually 40MB buffered, swap is
hardly ever used), or Network (FTP ran at 1000k/s).  So, only samba was
left.  Reviewing my smb.conf I see a note that a DOS copy of the same
FTP test averaged 500k/s.  Setting socket options TCP_NODELAY,
IPTOS_LOWDELAY, read raw=no, and read prediction = yes got the download
speed to about 725k/s and the upload speed to 1100k/s (and the users off
my back!).

HTH
dave