Performance problems (still)...

[Damon T. Miller]

Hello again...  I recently sent an email to the list regarding slow
performance on a Samba server.  I got a few responses (thanks!), and tried
all of the suggestions, but I'm still seeing about *half* the speed of NT
Server.  And this is on a machine which is at least twice as fast as the NT
Server, in terms of hardware.

I had never imagined that Samba would be leaps and bounds faster than NT,
but I did expect a comparable level of performance, especially from a
considerably faster machine.  After trying all of the various socket option
buffer sizes, read prediction, read and xmit sizes, read prediction and
strict sync to no avail, should I come to the conclusion that Samba is
simply (quite a bit) slower than NT?  Perhaps version 2.0 represents a large
performance increase?

Note that I still think Samba is an excellent package, and would really like
to continue using it...  It's just that the people using our network
services expect a certain degree of performance, and I cannot sacrifice that
entirely.

If anyone has any further ideas or suggestions, I'd love to hear them!  Note
that FTP performance rings in at around 6-7 MB/s for large files, so the
network and machine itself seem to working quite well.  Samba writes from
Windows 98 clients, while improved, now occur at about 700 KB/s and reads
are happening at about 1.5 MB/s.  (On the much slower NT Server, reads are
occurring at around 4 MB/s and writes at 2-3 MB/s...)

Thanks again,

Damon

* Damon T. Miller			* Network Administrator
* Harmonix Music Systems, Inc	* http://www.harmonixmusic.com
* Cambridge, Massachusetts		* 617.491.6144  x117