[Samba] Samba - XP performance problem

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 03:12:55PM +0200, David Beck wrote:
> Hello There,
> 
> After having googled the whole internet for days I decided to go public 
> with this issue.
> The result of my google queries so far is that there are plenty of 
> others with the very same problem I have and noone posted a reasonable 
> answer to this:
> 
> Using Samba 3 with XP gets bad performance. I tested this on Tru64 5.1b 
> and FreeBSD 5.3 with the very same symptoms.
> The throughput bw XP and Samba goes up and down. It starts transfering 
> with a reasonable speed and after having transfered around 16 megs it 
> slows down.
> I tried many configuration options regarding locking, tcp settings, xmit 
> size and every combination that could make any sense for me.
> 
> Then I gave up with this configuration mess as I could lower the 
> performnce easily, but the performance jittering was the same.
> 
> Now a few notes before I continue: I tested the FreeBSD server on the 
> loopback interface and the file write speed was around 43 Megs that is 
> close to the disks maximum. I also tested the XP machine with a Windows  
> server and the write performnce was around 10 Megs on a 100Mbit link. In 
> addition to that the FreeBSD machine is at my home and the Tru64 and the 
> Windows server are where I work. I'm pretty sure that this is not a 
> network issue.
> 
> After spending a lot of time with investigation I decided to go deeper 
> in this issue. I installed ethereal to capture the traffic and compare 
> the results bw XP-Windows and XP-Tru64. The test was to copy 50Meg file 
> to both servers and capture the packets. To my surprise the conversation 
> was quite different.
> 
> XP-Windows (excerpt):
> - nt create and x
> - trans2: query file info internal
> - set file info
> - tcp data stream...
> 
> XP-Samba (excerpt):
> - nt create and x
> - trans2: query file info internal
> - (query file info + write and x request) many times, incresing offset, 
> one byte length
> - tcp data stream....

Can you send me the ethereal capture traces please ? I have a theory...

Jeremy.