Hints for bad smbclient-2.0.3 put performance (Go back to 1.9.18p10!)

[David B. Rees]

Hi,

I've been experiencing extremely poor smbclient put performance.  I've written
about it a few times to the samba list, and to comp.protocols.smb, but no good
responses yet, except that I'm not the only one, and 1.9.18 may be better.

So I downloaded and compiled 1.9.18p10 for kicks, and found that the smbclient
there has excellent performance!  Now I get 900KB/s puts instead of 9K/s puts
with the smbclient compiled from 2.0.3.  This is writing to a Windows-95
machine, and from a Linux-2.2.7/glibc-2.1/egcs-1.1.2 machine.

I straced the two clients to try to figure out why the new one sucks so bad,
and I've found a clue:  smbclient-2.0.3 seems to only write data in chunks of
about 2K, while 1.9.19p10 sends data out in 64K chunks!  That would explain the
bad performance.  Just for kicks, I also used smbclient to connect to another
Linux/samba server and straced it.  1.9.19 was faster again, and was writing in
64K chunks, while 2.0.3 was writing in 16K chunks.

For now, I've just replaced my smbclient with smbclient from 1.9.18.

Also somewhat related, is that smbfs is performing very poorly in recent 2.2
kernels.  Writing to a smbfs filesystem using a simple cp command gets about
30-50KB/s.  Has anyone got any hints for this one?  I've tried all the various
smbfs mounting options, but nothing increases performance any.

-Dave