[Samba] Slow sequential write on Samba drive

[Don]

Jeremy Allison wrote:

>Firstly I need to reproduce the problem. I haven't been able to do
>that using a simple "copy XX n:\XX" command or using Windows explorer
>cut and paste. Once I get my XP vmware session to reproduce the behaviour
>I can start to experiment with fixing the problem.
>
>*Exactly* what are you doing to see this problem/SMB traffic pattern from
>an XP client ?
>  
>

All I am doing is running the evaluation version of PerformanceTest V5.0 
that I downloaded from http://www.passmark.com/.  I go to Edit / 
Preferences on the windows app, select my network mapped disk drive, 
leave the test duration as 3 secs and number of processes as 1, and then 
go to Tests / Disk and select the "All" option to test sequential read, 
write and random seek + RW. 

When I do this it takes a lot longer than 3 seconds, and my smbd process 
on the server hovers around 10% cpu usage for several seconds, then 
heads up to 95-99% and stays there for what appears to be the duration 
of the write test.  During this time there is no other activities going 
on on the machine.  The Sequential Write portion of the test lasts a 
very long time - around 30 or 40 minutes.

The reason why I'm doing this test is that I've observed that working 
with this networked drive from a winxp client "seems slow", so I'm 
trying to benchmark the performance so I can identify where the problem 
is and determine if any "fixes" I do have made anything better.

I'm using an out-of-the-box FC3 system (2.6.9-1.667), and samba 
3.0.14a-1.  Samba config file I sent in on the initial post. 

I do not notice any slowness over nfs.  However, that was why I was 
wondering if there are some linux benchmarking tools that I should try 
using to get more information on this problem.

Thanks,
Don