[Samba] Horrendously slow transfer speeds in FC3 is driving me crazy!!! Please help...

[AragonX]

<quote who="Peter Szmrecsanyi">
> Great a reply!!! I thought everyone had given up on me!
>
> OK for the specifications, it's a Compaq ProLiant 2500 server with:
> - Dual Pentium Pro (200MHz)
> - 256 MB EDO RAM
> - 36GB RAID(0) Compaq Raid Array (two 18GB SCSI disks)
> hdparm -tT gives:
> /dev/ida/c0d0p4:
>  Timing cached reads:   192 MB in  2.02 seconds =  95.11 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads:   46 MB in  3.03 seconds =  15.18 MB/sec
> - Compaq Netelligent Integrated 10/100 TX NIC
>
> I can do FTP at 9 MB/s but the absolute max I can get samba up to is about
> 4
> MB/s. I've tried installing version 3.0.14a, I'm compiling the old version
> 2.2.12 as I write this... I managed to get quite a performance boost when
> I
> compiled the latest version for the i686 architecture (100% performance
> increase using smbclient from another machine).
>
> What is annoying is that and NFS client in windows doesn't perform better
> than the samba client (using a Linux client NFS is slightly faster than
> FTP). I'm going to try compiling samba 3 without ACL support, then I'm
> going
> to try to install samba 2.2.12 if that doesn't solve it then I'll settle
> for
> a hardware issue and try to get hold of a 3C905 (3com NIC), after that
> I'll
> be out of ideas...

Have you taken a close look at top while doing the transfer?  I also
noticed that FC3 is more of a memory hog than previous versions.  I found
that 256mb of memory was way too low for most of my systems.  I was
getting a lot of swap space usage.  I use hotsanic to graph my usage
information.  This might be a good idea for you also.  It would help a
lot.  If you get any swap space usage, that is a clear performance killer.