[Samba] Network access speed.

[Rashkae]

Actually, Samba is really *fast*.

Now, personally, I take the Samba is x* faster than Windows with a large
grain of salt.  But if you experience speed problems, it is most certainly
an indication of Configuration / Network problems.

Here are my list of common things to consider.

Many configurations of Samba will cause force the host to do a reverse
lookup of the Client IP Address.  If this reverse lookup gets sent to a
DNS server that can't resolve the IP address (poorly configured ISP or
internal IP address), then this will stall any Samba connection for
several seconds, and may cause the connection to fail entirely
unpredictably. (sometimes it works, sometimes it doens't kind of thing.)

Make you test network speed with ftp.

Check ifconfig on your server for Errors on the network interface.  More
than 1 or 2 per month is a good sign of networking problems.

Many people like to turn off oplocks to increase reliability.  This would
be especially important if you have clients connecting over a WAN link.
Turning off oplocks is neither intuitive nor well documented on a Windows
server, so the system might seem to be faster since it's operating
differently.

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment.  Any more advice from those
more experienced?

On an unrelated note, our network problems in the office here have been
greatly reduced since I started replacing D-link hardware (network NIC and
swithching hubs) with dirt cheap RTL8139 knockOffs and Startech
hubs/switches.  Reading the comments of the RTL8139 Linux driver, one gets
the impression that the developer doesn't like the hardware internals, but
so far, my satisfaction with the hardware has been 100%.  Can anyone
enlighten me on what I'm missing out on?

On 16 Jul 2002, Trey Nolen wrote:

On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 16:16, Joel Hammer wrote:
> This issue of speed comes up a lot. I don't know the answer. Some claim
> its cheap NIC's, others that there is an authentication issue, and so on.
> What I never seen anybody do is run tcpdump and look at what the machines
> are saying to each other when things are slow.

We've had speed issues, too, but use "good" network cards and hardware.
Usually Intel or 3Com NICs and switches.  Maybe Samba is just slow...

Trey Nolen