smbclient slow

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, "Michael T. Ledford" 
<mikel at amberelectric.com> carved some runes like this:  

> Performance is the same when dragging files in explorer, this is how I
> noticed this behavior originally. FTP performance is not much better.
> 100 kb/s from samba to win and 687 kb/s from win to samba. The windows
> box was tweaked with mtuspeed.exe as per the directions in the
> Speed2.txt doc included with samba. MaxMTU = remove, RWIN = remove,
> MTUAutoDiscover = disable, MTUBlackHoleDetect = disable, TTL =
> enabled, TTL Hops = 32, NDI Cache Size = 0.

Wait a minute; now I'm confused (I'll admit it's not hard to do ;-)
You say FTP performance is not much better (how do you "ftp" to 
samba? do you mean smbclient, or ftp to the linux/unix host?).  Are 
you using the cheesy little DOS-prompt ftp client on the windoze 
side?  FTP is completely independent of SMB (except they both need 
TCP/IP), so if your ftp performance is that bad, it's a more 
fundamental problem (and has nothing to do with your samba 
configuration).  Are you running any other protocols on your 
network (other than TCP/IP)?

As for the windoze TCP/IP parameters, I didn't disable them 
according to the samba docs (because I need them for DUN).  What 
solved my initial samba performance/access problem was raising the 
RWIN value from 4xMSS (the default in MTUSpeed, as well as other 
references) to 8xMSS on the windoze client side (ie, I bumped it up 
from 2144 to 4288).

Does this problem happen on all windoze clients, or just one or 
two?  Are these clients running win95a, OSR/2, win98?  Have you 
applied any of the M$ updates (eg, vredir, tcp, ip, etc)?  
Sometimes the windoze network stack gets corrupted and the only way 
to fix it is to remove all protocols/clients and re-install them 
(you probably already know this, but it's worth a shot).

What's the performance like when you ftp between two linux/unix 
machines?  It sounds like it's a problem with something other than 
samba.  If so, feel free to mail me directly if you want to pursue 
it further (I have a little test network at home; maybe I can 
replicate your problem...)

Regards, Steve


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Stephen L Arnold                             sarnold at earthling.net

"A mime is a terrible thing to waste..."  -  Mel Brooks