[Samba] samba 3 performance

John H Terpstra jht at Samba.Org
Wed Apr 27 19:16:08 GMT 2005


Guys,

To add to this info. The last benchmarks I did were in 2003. Within the next 
two months I will benchmark a new system that will have dual 3Ware SATA RAID 
controllers each with 6 high performance drives in an Opteron system. I am 
anxious to see the performance stats, particularly compared against the 
previous stats on an AMD dual CPU system with a single 3Ware IDE RAID 
controller and 4x60GB WD 7200 rpm drives - 452MBytes/sec peak I/O with samba, 
and a peak sustainable write rate of 115 MBytes/sec. That write rate nose 
dives badly with concurrent mutiple file write activity and/or read activity 
that causes significant seek activity on the drives in the RAID array.

In summary: The biggest bottleneck in Samba implementations are:
	a) CPU bandwith
	b) Memory
	c) Disk I/O bandwidth

In most cases I have found the default "socket options" with the 2.4.x and 
2.6.x kernels quite adequate.

- John T.

On Wednesday 27 April 2005 13:00, Alexander Lazarevich wrote:
> Hey Darcy,
>
> I'm drooling over your setup. RAID6, way cool.
>
> 60MB/sec is double what we are getting. I'm stuck thinking it's some
> default XP Pro configuration that's keeping us at 30MB/sec. Did you
> have any trouble getting XP Pro above 30MB/sec? Doesn't sound like it.
>
> Anyway, did you enable jumbo frames in your switches and NIC drivers?
> Also, in your smb.conf, did you try tweeking with the socket options. such
> as:
>
> socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE
> socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=16384 SO_SNDBUF=16384
>
> Hope that helps, but I doubt it, you probably already tried that stuff.
>
> Alex
>
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Darcy Bangsund wrote:
> > Hey Alexander
> > Having similar issues as you were on the same hardware. I was wondering
> > if you
> > ended up making any progress on this ? and what you ended up doing
> > I've benchmarked my drive arrays at up to 240 GB/sec each and I
> > consistently move only about 60 - 80 MB of data through samba. At the
> > same time I'm able to conduct NFS transfers to clinets up to around 80 MB
> > /sec but samba always stay's around 60ish.
> >
> > I used to get double the performance running a dual 3 ghz XEON on an SGI
> > redhat9 2.4 kernel with drives that would benchmark half as fast.
> >
> > What am I missing ?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Server
> > Quad intel nic e1000
> > fc3 ( admittedly an older kernel but shouldn't matter to much)2.6.9
> > Opteron 246 on tyan mobo
> > Qlogic 2342 controller
> > 2 fibre chassis/Areca controllers/RAID6/ 16 x SATA RAID
> > XFS fs
> >
> > Workstations
> > W2K
> > service pack 4
> >
> >
> > Switches
> > 1 x Foundry layer 3 fastiron
> > 3 x Foundry layer 2 edgeiron
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Alexander Lazarevich" <alazarev at itg.uiuc.edu>
> > To: <samba at lists.samba.org>
> > Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 4:42 PM
> > Subject: RE: [Samba] samba 3 performance
> >
> >> Marc,
> >>
> >> Thanks for the feedback. I've got a dual 64-bit opteron system (246),
> >> going to run FC3, and I'll try to get 75+MB/sec from samba 3 <-> windows
> >> xp client. I'll let you know the results.
> >>
> >> Alex
> >>
> >> On Fri, 25 Feb 2005, Kaplan, Marc wrote:
> >>> Yes, I get more than 30MB/s performance. The benchmark I use (NetBench)
> >>> is essentially CPU bound, such that a faster processor = faster
> >>> performance. With a very fast hardware config (dual 3.2GHz processors),
> >>> I've been able to hit around 100MB/s. Changing the RAM or other
> >>> attributes does not buy me much, it seems that processor power is the
> >>> bottleneck (at least in my case).
> >>>
> >>> When doing your speed test, monitor the CPU utilization for smbd, and
> >>> see if it's at 100% of your linux server.
> >>>
> >>> -Marc
> >>>
> >>>> -----Original Message-----
> >>>> From: samba-bounces+marc_kaplan=adaptec.com at lists.samba.org
> >>>
> >>> [mailto:samba-
> >>>
> >>>> bounces+marc_kaplan=adaptec.com at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of
> >>>
> >>> Alexander
> >>>
> >>>> Lazarevich
> >>>> Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 11:36 AM
> >>>> To: samba at lists.samba.org
> >>>> Subject: [Samba] samba 3 performance
> >>>>
> >>>> Does anyone succesfully get more than 60MB/sec sequential throughput,
> >>>> WITHOUT jumbo frames, with the following configuration:
> >>>>
> >>>> samba 3 on RedHat linux server
> >>>> windows XP Pro workstations
> >>>> GigE NIC's and GigE switches
> >>>>
> >>>> Assuming all the disks/buses on the server and client ends are capable
> >>>
> >>> of
> >>>
> >>>> those speeds. We have that exact setup, and we only get 30MB/sec
> >>>
> >>> maximum
> >>>
> >>>> sequential throughput. In fact our servers and clients disk benchmark
> >>>
> >>> at
> >>>
> >>>> more than 100MB/sec seq. throughput, and our netperf is >100MB/sec as
> >>>> well, but we still only get 30MB/sec when going through samba.
> >>>>
> >>>> Also, we actually do not manage our network switches, and we are told
> >>>
> >>> the
> >>>
> >>>> switches do not support jumbo frames, so changing the MTU on the
> >>>
> >>> client
> >>>
> >>>> NIC's and samba get's us nowhere because the switches won't do it
> >>>
> >>> anyway.
> >>>
> >>>> Mostly I'm just trying to find out if anyone get's decent GigE network
> >>>> throughput through samba 3. I want to rule out that samba is the
> >>>> bottleneck.
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks,
> >>>>
> >>>> Alex
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>> To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
> >>>> instructions:  https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
> >>
> >> --
> >> To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
> >> instructions:  https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba

-- 
John H Terpstra
Samba-Team Member
Phone: +1 (650) 580-8668

Author:
The Official Samba-3 HOWTO & Reference Guide, ISBN: 0131453556
Samba-3 by Example, ISBN: 0131472216
Hardening Linux, ISBN: 0072254971
Other books in production.


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