[Samba] Poor Samba Preformance

[AragonX]

<quote who="Steve Jr Ramage">
> I recently upgraded a part of my network to Gigabit ethernet, basically
> between my Linux machine and my main windows machine, is now gigabit.
> The problem is that, and the whole reason I went with it, is to get
> faster speeds with samba. I've only been able to get 13.4 MB/s as a
> maximum transfer speed. I don't expect to be able to get 125 MB/s. If I
> use HTTP I can get around 18 MB/s, and that would be fine I suppose for
> now. Now what samba can do is, that I can get two connections to two
> different machines going at about 13 MB/s one and 12 MB/s (100 Mbps) the
> other, and they don't really affect eachother, so the bandwidth is
> there, but getting samba to send as much as possible down one connection
> seems to be a problem. iperf between the machines, managed to get 528
> Mbps.

I have had similar problems with transfers.  A good test would be to make
a large file (greater than 2gb) and FTP it from your Samba server to your
Windows client.  If the FTP goes substantially faster than the Samba
transfer of the same file, your Samba configuration needs some help.  This
has not usually been the case for me.

Some information on your hardware would help.  If you have IDE drives,
what does hdparm -i say on the share drive?  Also what does hdparm
/dev/(hd?) for the drive say?  Are you using UDMA, 32bit, multi-IO etc?

Also, take a look at top when doing the large transfer.  If you get hi hi
and wa values (40% or higher) the problem is probably hardware related. 
Currently my wa and hi values combined when doing a large transfer are
about 80%.

I was only getting 1.5MB/sec when I first upgraded to FC3.  Then I
modified hdparm and now I get about 18MB/sec.  This still isn't the best
that the hard drives can do, but it's the best my mobo/CPU can.  Next I'm
going to upgrade those and see what I can get.

If any of this info is in error, please someone let me know.