Samba performance on FreeBSD

[Dan O'Connor]

The slow write times in FreeBSD seems to have been fixed late in the Samba
2.0.5a life-cycle. Make sure you're using the latest Samba (and rebuild the
port so the patches take effect) and the latest FreeBSD. I find that Samba
2.0.6 humms along quite nicely under FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE.

Also, you might want to consider using softupdates to speed up writing in
general. (See /usr/src/sys/ufs/ffs/README.softupdates and
/usr/src/sys/contrib/softupdates/README) Softupdates gives you (close to)
the speed of async writes without the inherent data-loss danger...

--Dan

**  The thing I like most about Windows 98 is...
**  You can download FreeBSD with it!


-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Welk <mw at freibergnet.de>
To: Multiple recipients of list SAMBA <samba at samba.org>
Date: Monday, December 20, 1999 5:00 AM
Subject: Samba performance on FreeBSD


>Dear Samba team & other readers,
>
>I'm a satisfied user using Samba as a file server for Windows based
>networks and I'm primarily using FreeBSD for this purpose.
>When I started to use Samba about half a year ago, I was upset about
>the lousy performance but tried my best to search for that problem
>at myself. The machine at this time as a Pentium/200 PC with some
>SCSI harddisks and 64 mbyte of memory. Reading was quiet quick, but
>writing to the server (especially many small files) was sooo sloooow.
>
>In the Samba man page I found the hint to the socket option configuration
>directive and read also the FreeBSD getsockopt/setsockopt(4) man page
>carefully. After increasing them and setting other options I noticed
>a signficant performance increase, that means, you cannot really
>compare anymore if you're writing to a local disk or to a network
>server during delay work.
>
>Currently I use:
>
>socket options = IPTOS_LOWDELAY TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=262144
SO_RCVBUF=262144
>
>Meanwhile, some number of people use FreeBSD and also Samba and the
>question why Samba is so slow appears again and again and again on
>the mailing lists.
>
>So I thought about committing a change to the FreeBSD port for Samba
>(some set of Makefiles and patches that use a Samba distribution to
>compile a FreeBSD binary) that way, that at least the send/receive
>buffer options will become default (perhaps with a little smaller
>value). It could also set as a default from the configure script
>when it determines it's running on FreeBSD.
>
>Now I wanted to ask you if there's something dangerous in doing so or a
>good reason why it isn't the default yet.
>
>Thank you very much in advance, also for correcting me :-)
>
>Regards,
>
>Martin
>--
>FreibergNet Systemhaus GbR                   Martin Welk * Sales, Support
>Systemhaus für Daten- und Netzwerktechnik           phone +49 3731 781387
>Unternehmensgruppe Liebscher & Partner                fax +49 3731 781377
>D-09599 Freiberg * Am St. Niclas Schacht 13    http://www.freibergnet.de/
>
>