[Samba] samba 3 performance issues

[Jeremy Allison]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 01:52:29PM -0500, Rohit Kumar Mehta wrote:
> 
> I believe I have some hardware or configuration related performance 
> issues running samba 3.0.14a-3sarge.
> 
> Our server is an Intel Celeron 2 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM and a 3ware
> card using SATA disks in a RAID 5 configuration (3ware controller card). 
>  We have a gigabit network and are using Intel Gigabit ethernet cards 
> e1000).
> 
> When copying large files to the samba shares on the system, the transfer
> rate maxes out near 100 mb/s.  We tested with nttcp and were able to get
> speeds of nearly 800mb/s.  So I think it is safe to conclude this is not 
> a network issue.
> 
> Various tools like top, xosview and mpstat convinced us that we are 
> bound in the CPU. Stopping the samba file transfer and the cpu idle time 
> exceeds 90%.  We are convinced that our CPU is the bottleneck,
> but not sure why.

Have you tried transferring the files using smbclient ? That will
tell you if it's a Windows client issue. I'm assuming you're using
Windows clients although you didn't give that information in your
message.

Jeremy.