[Samba] performance problem with samba in any version and small files

[Thomas Reiß]

Hallo Pascal Hahn, 

> I got big performance roblems in here with our big file server. We got a 2.4 
> ghz Intel xeon in there, 1 gb ram and 2 scsi hds in softraid 1 on an adaptec 
> Adaptec ASC-29320 U320. The array is set up with standard ext3 system.
> 
> We are running samba on it with our business softwares data on it. Its a 
> program which uses lots of small and some bigger text files to store info in. 
> When we work on the server with 4 persons we got about 1200 files locked abd 
> being read. it isnt that much of data(per client about 50 mb transferred) but 
> the speed is veery slow. I get about 10 mb/s from the raid in all which is 
> nothing. I also got the samba process eating all 100 % of my cpu.
> 
> I tried to move the files outside the raid but that didnt have any effect on 
> the performance.
> 
> Does anyone have an idea how i can speed up the performance? Is it possible 
> that the locking slows down the performance so much?

Have you the Chance to change the Filesystem (to reiser or xfs) ?
These FS _should_ be better on a lot of Files in a Directory and 
Handling of that.

Or play with the Options 

-R stripe=stripe_size

and

-J device=other_journal_device

of mkfs.ext3.

Hope it helps
Thomas