[Samba] Throughput Constraints

[Doug VanLeuven]

Baron Young wrote:

>I hope I'm in the right place for this question.  I am in the process of creating a large scale production fileserver architecture for the purpose of serving very large files (~4.5GB) to a small number of clients (~200).  My assumptions to this point have been that my throughput would be constrained by hardware and not software, but I would like some validation of this thinking.  I am hoping to achieve throughput rates of ~200MB/s using whatever hardware needed to achieve this (FC on the disk side, possible infiniband or multiple 1Gb ethernet links for network side).  CPU would be 2-4 3+ Ghz, 8-16GB mem (more if needed).  I've "heard" that my throughput using Samba could be limited to more like 80MB/s but I'm not sure why this would be the case.
>   
>  Any experiences using Samba for throughput rates this high would be much appreciated.
>  
>
When I ran tests, I was using standard 32 bit PCI, two machines 
connected by crossover cable, one intel server card and one workstation 
card.
My numbers were more like 180 MBytes download.
Uploads were 50-80 MBytes.  This wasn't a samba issue, and was 
reproducable between two 2000 windows machines.  Never figured why.
Jumbo frames improved things, but can't be used in a mixed local 
environment.

Regards, Doug