Samba (smbfs) performance problem

[Urban Widmark]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Maier Gerfried wrote:

> Hello Samba Mailing-List!
> 
> I have two machines connected via a 100MBit Ethernet. This works fine.
> When I transfer a 50MByte file from one Machine to the other using ftp I
> 
> get trasfer-rates of about 5MBytes per second (put and get).
> Similar results are obtained when transferring the file with smbclient.
> 
> When I mount the share using smbmount I get quite poor transfer-rates of
> 
> less than 1MByte per second when getting from server and even less
> when putting. (transferring the file with cp).

Part of the problem is that cp checks for the best blocksize and smbfs
tells it that it is 512 bytes. Using 'dd' allows you to specify the size
of the blocks, so try this and see if you get better performance on "put":

dd if=srcfile of=/mnt/smb/outfile bs=4096

Reads always read one page at a time so there should be no improvement
there.

The other part of the problem is how smbfs works in the 2.2 kernel (and
2.4). It sends one read request, waits for it to finish then sends the
next. It is being worked on in 2.5.

I might have something worth testing on a 2.4.17 kernel at the end of the
weekend. But don't count on it.

/Urban