[Samba] Optimise Samba for MYOB

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 07:30 +0000, Jackie Chan wrote:
> First a short background of the situation,
> 
> My work ran a MYOB file from a MS 2000 server.  They were getting problems 
> such as the,
> 
> "cannot send messages to so-and-so.  blah blah blah..."
> 
> They were planning to upgrade to MS 2003 in an attempt to eradicate all 
> error messages and remove the lag sometimes experienced when opening a large 
> list.

Is this a suggestion by MYOB's vendor, or just a hunch?

> Since i am a linux fan i suggested giving samba 3.0.11 a try, i was 
> convinced it would be an improvement.  After all Linux is the best right.

Samba emulates windows as closely as possible in areas of protocol
correctness, which in particular includes locking correctness.  While
Samba does allow more tweaks (in particular, it can deny oplocks on a
more granular basis) the locking behaviour (which is almost certainly to
blame for both MYOB issues this week) is identical.

The only thing I would suggest (which would be in common to both
systems) is to look very, very carefully at your network gear.  Most
reports of bad Samba performance are due to latency inflicted by poor
quality NICs and switches.  I have seen this on my network with other
locking-intensive applications.  

The money spent on Intel, or even Netgear FA-311 NICs, and *decent*
switches will be well worth it.  Ditch the RTL8139 cards as fast as you
can.  We have had good luck with the non-toy Dlink switches, and very
bad luck with anything cheaper.

Otherwise, as the performance problems are general to networked MYOB, I
suggest you instead chase the vendor.  

I realise everybody is in a rush, and it is coming up to tax time again
(at least for those who have Australian accountants :-), but as it
matches windows, I'm not sure we can help other than the oplock settings
you already use.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College  http://hawkerc.net
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