[Samba] Samba on NAS perfs

[Jonathan DEL CAMPO /jdc/ .Y]

 Hi,

I am running a samba 3.0.14a server on a 2.6.15.6 kernel, on a 4T - SATA2
NAS.
The disks are formated in xfs and configurated in hard RAID5. Network is
bonded with 2 Gbits links using 802.3ad agregation. The NAS is connected
on a Gbits switch (Summit 400 - extreme Networks), also configured with
dynamic sharing.
I am trying to get the best performances in Reading/writting the NAS, and
what I am obtaining is very poor ...

I have been trying many kind of tests with several clients (win XP
console, win XP gui, MACOSX, many linux ...).
The fact is first I can't get the first NAS interface overloaded, it never
get the turn to the second one.
I have very poor transfer rates :
 -copy to windows from a NAS Samba export : max 20 MBytes/s  with many
kind of file sizes
 -copy to Linux (on firewire 800) from a NAS Samba export : max 12
MBytes/s  with many kind of file sizes
The linux mount is made using CIFS drivers.

on the other side, writting on the NAS give me the same results.

I have also made some tests with the IOMeter tool on a winXP samba mount,
configure with a transfert request size of 32MB, 100% reading, full
sequential access. With 4 workers on the same client I get (according to
snmp results) a rate of 80 MBytes/s !

PS : Directly on the NAS, using the tool Bonnie++ (not using samba...) we
get a pretty 150 MBytes/s with the writting tests.
PS2 : We have made theses tests with samba,nfs and Afp exports 

The clients configurations are the following :

- linux clients :
Bi-Proc 1Ghz - 1 GB RAM
Disks Firewire 800
GbE network

- Avid HP WinXP
Bi-Proc 3Ghz
2GB RAM
6 SCSI RAID0 drives
GbE network

Thanks for helping me to understand why we can't get better perfs ?

john