Very slow performance after installing RAID controllers

[Thomas Cameron]

Hi all -

I never got an answer last time I posted this, so I'll try again.

I have an old Compaq Proliant 2500R with dual PPro 200 CPUs and a gig of RAM.  I used to have an external Proliant Storage System F1 array with seven 9.1GB drives attached to the on-board SCSI controller on the server, and I used software RAID under Red Hat 7.0.  The performance of Samba (2.0.6, maybe?) was great - very fast copying files to and from the server over 100MB/s ethernet.

I just installed two Smart-2/P array controllers and an additional F1 external array, this one with 36GB drives.  This puts one external array on each of the array controllers.  I also upgraded to Red Hat 7.1.  Now, network performance is horrible!  a 100 meg file takes 15-20 minutes to copy from the server to a client PC.

Here's the weird part - when I copy files from one external array to the other using the cp command at the console, it is very fast (650MB in under two minutes).  When I copy files within each array, it is also similarly fast.  So, I don't think it is disk subsystem - I only mention it because I'm grasping at straws here.

I have tried downloading and compiling Samba 2.2.2.  I have fiddled with SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF as well, but it doesn't affect the speed at all.

Anyone have any idea why network performance would tank so badly in these circumstances?  I really don't want to yank the array controllers, but I'm about at the end of my rope...

Thanks for any guidance at all.
Thomas Cameron
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