[Samba] samba 3 performance

[Eric Feldhusen]

John H Terpstra wrote:
> 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.

I have two servers running Samba 3.0.4 on Redhat 8.0 on dual athlon 
1600mp on tyan s2469 boards each using 3Ware 7504, with 3 200GB 7200rpm 
WD in a hw raid 5 array using ext3.  Now, while I don't have to all the 
numbers to really quantify what happened on my network, I saw similar 
problems with my setup with concurrent read/write activity that causes 
high seek activity.  On my networks, I originally had all windows 9x 
machines, then, at both schools we swapped out about 1/2 of about 200 
machines with windows 2k machines,  suddenly at beginning of class 
periods and end of class periods, high loads, 40-50 via looking at top, 
on the server, but very little cpu and network use, but high disk 
activity ( http://webminstats.sourceforge.net ).  Anyway, in looking at 
3ware's site, I found a reference that with ext3, the 3ware card is 
slower than XFS or ReiserFS ( 
http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=10095 ). Now, unfortunately, 
it's not an apples to apples comparsion, but I just finished wiping out 
and upgrading both servers to FC3 on XFS, on the exact same hardware, 
and I'm seeing a much lower load (3-7 via top) at the same class changes 
and the system remains responsive.  I wanted to wipe the system and 
reinstall with RH8 with XFS with same hardware, but with production 
servers...time, effort, et... On the plus side, between going from a 
2.4.xx kernel to a 2.6.xx kernel, and from ext3 to XFS, and from Samba 
3.0.4 to 3.0.10, the same hardware is now handling my network with 200 
windows 2k machines, whereas the old system was struggling with 100.

Anyway, sorry for the long, rambling post that didn't really have to do 
with Samba, just curious what file system was used for the original test.

Have to love Open Source, it's good stuff.

Eric Feldhusen

-- 
Notice: New email address - eric at remc1.org
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Eric Feldhusen
Network Administrator for Adams, Chassell,
Dollar Bay, and Lake Linden Public Schools
email: eric at remc1.org
phone: 906-370-6202