[Samba] samba performance issue

[Martyn Ranyard]

Very strange,

   Feel not alone, however - I too have some performance concerns :

   A Samba 2.0.8 Slackware 7 Machine was working fine for nigh on a year, 
and then it started to degrade, to the point where an app that used network 
database which used to come up almost instantaneously started taking 5 
seconds.  Annoying, as the customer had got used to the speed.  Also on a 
100Mb Switch, with only 6 client machines.

   As a last effort we upgraded to 2.2.4 and it felt much faster, however, 
I did some testing before and after the upgrade :

   Before the upgrade, a file transfer from a client (50MB random data) was 
taking 50 Seconds and not utilising all the bandwidth.
   Before the upgrade, a file transfer to a client (50MB random data) was 
taking 100 Seconds and not utilising all the bandwidth.
   After the upgrade, a file transfer from a client (50MB random data) was 
taking 25 Seconds and not utilising all the bandwidth.
   After the upgrade, a file transfer to a client (50MB random data) was 
taking 50 Seconds and not utilising all the bandwidth.
   Before and after the upgrade, and ftp transfer of the same file took 20 
seconds either way.

   This really got me stumped, but as the speed was near normal again, I 
have left the site, but would like to know if this double time transfers is 
usual or if there is anything we can do to find out why.

Martyn

At 09:34 AM 6/11/02 -0500, Trey Nolen wrote:
>Now, the problem...I'm getting very poor performance. The machine we
>replaced was a Pentium I 200 with 64MB of RAM, and it was faster than this
>thing.  All of my client machines are Win98 SE.  The biggest problem is
>when the executable itself is on the server. If it is, the program loads
>VERY slowly. I have loaded Netstat to look at the network throughput. When
>I am loading an EXE from the server, my throughput is very low.  I made a
>300 MB test file to copy back and forth across the network. On each
>machine, I'm getting about 35Mbit. I can copy the same file to two machines
>at the same time and get 35Mbit on both. I have not tested three at a time
>because this was enough to show me that the network was not the bottleneck.
>This network is 100Mbit on a switch.  When copying the files, the client
>machine's processor always shows 100%. When loading programs from the
>server the machines also show 100%.  BUT, I get the same performance from a
>550 Mhz PIII machine, a 1000Mhz Athlon machine, and an 1800+ Athlon XP.
>Also, like I said, the Novell server makes the clients much faster. I have
>eliminated all the protocol traffic that I can -- all machines are on
>TCP/IP only. I can put the EXEs on the client machines and just read the
>data from the server for improved performace, but it is still not as good
>as it should be (or as good as the old server).
>
>Now for the question....does anyone know of anything I can do to improve
>performance? Or do I need to go back and install Novell on the new machine
>(I really don't want to)?
>
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Trey Nolen
>
>
>
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Martyn Ranyard
Free Software Advocate

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