[Samba] Poor performance between linux boxes using Samba 3

[Roger Lucas]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for the clarification.  I had assumed that since it was the "client"
side of the connection, that smbclient was being used (indirectly) as the
program/driver/whatever that was actually doing the hard work.  If this is
actually being done by "smbfs" and smbfs is getting a bit stale, then it
explains why cifsfs is so much better.  (It is also nice that it is built
into the kernel - an unexpected pleasant surprise !  :-)

Regards,

Roger

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Allison [mailto:jra at samba.org] 
Sent: 10 October 2005 23:36
To: Roger Lucas
Cc: 'Jeremy Allison'; samba at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [Samba] Poor performance between linux boxes using Samba 3

On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 11:31:06PM +0100, Roger Lucas wrote:
> Hi Jeremy,
> 
> Thanks for the info.  I ran another test with a 100MB file as below:
> 
> 	mount -t smbfs //machineb/share /mnt/machineb ....
> 	cp test-100mb.dat /mnt/machineb/test1.dat
> 	umount /mnt/machineb
> 
> The above copy took 60 seconds.
> 
> 	mount -t cifs //machineb/share /mnt/machineb ....
> 	cp test-100mb.dat /mnt/machineb/test2.dat
> 	umount /mnt/machineb
> 
> This copy took just 20 seconds.
> 
> I am running kernel 2.6.8 which apparently has CIFS built in.
> 
> I am amazed by the performance increase, so CIFS definitely seems the way
to
> go.  Is there a deep reason for why this is, as CIFS seems to be part of
the
> SAMBA team (http://linux-cifs.samba.org/) so it seems weird that they have
> both the smbclient and CIFS client with such massive performance
> differences....

You're confusing smbfs with smbclient. smbfs is an old, rather unmaintained
part of the Linux kernel, smbclient is the ftp command-line like client
shipped with Samba.

Steve tests CIFSFS with modern versions of Samba and works dilligently
on performance issues.

Jeremy.