[Samba] Slow file transfers and lock ups.

[Jannetta S Steyn]

Hi All

I hope someone can point me in the right direction here. I have just
upgraded a client's machine from running a 4 year old version of Slackware
and and a Samba just as old to Fedora Core 4 and the latest Samba in the
Fedora mirrors - seems to be 3.0.14a-2. After the installation, the client
complained that data transfer was extremely slow. It took 70 seconds to
save a 3.8Mb file and a backup that used to take 5 minutes took almost 30
minutes.

I changed the config file to exactly what it was on the old server and
restarted Samba. The config now is:
[global]
   workgroup = WORKGROUP
   netbios name = ServerName
   server string = ServerName %v
   encrypt passwords = Yes
   socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=8192 SO_RCVBUF=8192
   log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
   max log size = 50
   os level = 33
   hosts allow = 192.168.0
   # preferred master = yes
   # local master = no
   # security = user
   # idmap uid = 16777216-33554431
   # idmap gid = 16777216-33554431
   # template shell = /bin/false
   # winbind use default domain = no
   # fake oplocks=NO
   # oplocks=NO
   # level 2 oplocks=NO
[fileserver]
        comment = Fileserver
        path = /fileserver
        read only = No
        browsable = yes
        writable = yes


The commented lines are what used to be in the file. After the restart
though the client still didn't see any improvement, but at some stage the
server disappeared off the network. He then restarted the server and then
found that the 30 minute backup now took 15 minutes.

However, this is still too slow. Normal saving of files still seem to be
slow and the backup still needs to come down to at least 5 minutes to be
the same as before.

I did read the documentation that suggests that in some cases oplocks be
set to NO, as well as level 2 oplocks. It does however need to be done on
the server and the workstations. As you can see however, after commenting
out the oplocks there was an improvement - I remember from 3 or 4 years
ago doing that when we had similar problems. So before venturing in
setting oplocks to no on both the server and workstations, could anybody
perhaps suggest something else?

The documentation specifically mentions Act! as needing to have oplocks
set to no. Can some of you perhaps list some other applications that also
definitely need this to be done?

Another mystery to me is why the restart of the service didn't have any
effect? Why did the server need a restart?

Well all help would be welcome and appreciated.

Kind Regards
Jannetta




Random Thought:
---------------
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children.
		-- Kingsley Amis