Samba performance compared to Windows 98

Kim Payne kpayne at cirvisinc.com
Thu Nov 2 00:46:51 GMT 2000


> -----Original Message-----
> From: samba-admin at us5.samba.org [mailto:samba-admin at us5.samba.org]On
> Behalf Of Johann Zuschlag
> Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2000 6:11 PM
> To: samba at samba.org
> Subject: Re: Samba performance compared to Windows 98
>
>
> Try the MS TCP/IP patch, since 95/98 has a broken TCP stack. But
> usually that helps with slow machines only.

Any idea where I can find the patch.  microsoft.com only listed an updated
tcp/ip stack for 95 and NT.  We have 98 on all our clients and some have
98SE.  I'm not sure if it will help though since the problems are generally
across all clients.

> My network runs fine without the patch. And don't let yourself
> fool by the cache (oplocks), since it might show higher transfer
> rates due to caching in
> windows.
>
> Average should be:
> 10Mbit - 750-800kbit/sec (hub)
> 100Mbit 3,5 Mbit/sec (hub) switch might give better results

We have a 100Mbps network and it our setup produces about those results.  My
concern is I can't find any setting anywhere to bring the performance on par
with Windows 98  (either due to my lack of experience in Linux or our
hardware has better drivers in Win98 than in Linux).

Today, I tested the times from a machine with both Windows 98 and Redhat
Linux 6.2 w Samba 2.0.7.  Windows 98 is about 10-15% faster in most regards.
I was using the same machine as the server and the same machine as the
client in all tests.  I used a batch file to keep track of the start and end
time between a file copy.

For a 2 meg file, Win98 get = 13.55 MB/s (odd I know)	Win98 put = 5.82 MB/s.
			Samba get = 11.87 MB/s			Samba put = 5.03 MB/s.

For a 21 meg file,	Win98 get = 5.56 MB/s		Win98 put = 4.64 MB/s.
				Samba get = 7.74 MB/s		Samba put = 3.04 MB/s.

I tried the suggestions about ethernet drivers without much luck.  We have a
3C905C card from  3Com.  The drivers from 3com didn't help performance any.
I do see some tx errors, but I am not sure if this is a normal error.  It's
not a big percentage of packets.

Are there any options I should try to see if it's IDE performance that is
better in 98 than in Linux?  I am at a loss.

Kim





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