[Samba] Performance issues

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 10:08:33AM -0700, Ryan Wright wrote:
> List,
> 
> I apologize for the "newbie" nature of this post; I am sure there is
> an easy answer somewhere, but I've tried all the search terms I can
> think up and can't find it.
> 
> I have some video archived on a White Box 4 machine. I watch it on a
> Windows XP box in the other room by mapping a drive to a Samba share.
> Seemingly at random, my video stream will halt due to an inability to
> receive data from the server. If I pause for a few seconds and resume,
> everything is usually fine. This generally happens only once or twice
> per hour, but it's annoying.
> 
> The video is not huge. We're talking ~350MB xvid files, 45 minutes
> each (compressed network TV shows). The Samba server used to be a
> Windows 2000 Server and the same video files worked perfectly from
> there. Network is gigabit on the server side, 100mbit on the client
> side - though even wireless should be able to stream these files.
> Virtually no traffic on the network (just my computers and they mostly
> sit idle unless I'm using them).
> 
> I saw this problem again last night when copying ~10GB worth of files
> from another XP box to the Samba share. The copy stopped a couple of
> times, telling me the network path no longer existed, but after
> clicking OK I could still browse the share just fine. It's like an
> intermittant, very temporary glitch.

This kind of thing is hard to debug. You need to keep very accurate
statistics on what is going on on the server over the copying period
to be able to debug this. I'd try running vmstat 1 (every second) and
capturing the output over the copying period to try and catch this.

Jeremy.