[Samba] Am I getting the best performance?

[John H Terpstra]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, Me wrote:

> > Did you check the impact of increasinf the SO_RECVBUF and SO_SNDBUF to
> > 128KByte?
>
> No I have not.  I will try it though.  I have 512MB of RAM in my server so
> I'm not too worried about memory.

Let me know what you find.

> >> It seems to me that I should be able to get close to the 9.30MB/sec
> >> when transfering over the network.
> >>
> >> Still 9.3MB/sec is no where near the 26MB/sec hdparm is reporting...
> >>
> >> I'm on a 100Mb switch and I'm using 3Com 905TX NICs in both the
> >> workstation and the server.
> >
> > An 100MB/s == 11 megabytes/sec at peak I/O and no network contention.
> > Copared with that 9.3 megabytes/sec is VERY good!
>
> Yes but the 9.3MB/sec was from drive to drive not over the network.

And how does it perform if you use ext2fs?

> >> I guess the best my network can put out is 12MB/sec.  I was hoping to
> >> get around 10MB/sec with Samba.  Is this unreasonable???
> >
> > No - not reasonable. You have IP stack, a TCP stack, then buffering from
> > the kernel to samba's smbd with is user space, then I/O back to the
> > kernel and ultimately to the Disk subsystem. Lot's of overhead in other
> > words.
> >
> > You did well over 100Mbit ethernet!
>
> Humm.  I can get 10MB/sec using FTP.  Does Samba have more overhead?  I
> was told it should perform on par with FTP.  Is this not true?

Much more overhead! NO questions!

> > What file system? ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs???? Even that makes a
> > hugh difference.
>
> All my server file systems are ext3.

Good results then. Try ext2fs.

- John T.
-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org