Very slow performance after installing RAID controllers

[Thomas Cameron]

I want to apologize - I just re-installed Windows and I forgot to turn off
HTML formatting.  Sorry for sending HTMl to the list in my previous post.

Mea maxima culpa.

Thomas

----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Cameron
To: samba at lists.samba.org
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 1:40 AM
Subject: Very slow performance after installing RAID controllers


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