[Samba] Weird Samba upload performance on Gigabit network

[David Harrison]

On 10/11/2006, at 12:22 PM, John Drescher wrote:

> On 11/9/06, David Harrison <david.harrison at stress-free.co.nz> wrote:
> - BUT OSX Tiger to Samba 3.0.23C (Suse 10) file transfers operate at
> 1-2meg/second which is well down from expected performance.
>
> The strange thing is if I begin a file transfer from OSX Tiger to
> Samba and in a terminal window on OSX begin an SCP copy operation to
> the same Suse server the file transfer speed of Samba jumps up to
> gigabit level speeds. As soon as the SCP copy operation is stopped
> the Samba file transfer process drops to 1-2meg/second again.
>
> Looking at your numbers I believe that you have both network and  
> samba problems.
>
> Can you run netperf or do some nfs testing?
>
> Today I ran it and found out a few of my servers (using nvidia mobo  
> adapters) although the gigabit light was on the nic and the switch  
> the adapter was not transfering at gigabit speeds.  I did a nfs  
> test like the following:
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/remoteserver/test.dat bs=16k count=16k
>
> and got around 10MB/s which is only 100mbit speeds. On netperf I  
> verified that my maximum transfer rate was around 94mbit/s so I  
> googled a bit and then ended up upgrading my kernel to 2.6.18 and  
> then did the same test and I got 109 MB/s on netperf and on the nfs  
> test above I got 43MB/s and after setting nfs to asynchronous mode  
> I got 57MB/s.
>
> John

I've updated the Suse box to the 2.6.18.2 kernel with no effect.
I'm not in a position to run NFS tests on the machine but I'm  
guessing it is the network card (low-end Netgear with the r8169 driver).
To (hopefully) fix the problem for good I've ordered a decent gigabit  
card that by the looks of it has good Linux support.
I'd rather spend the money than continue messing with a card/driver  
that according to Google has some underlying performance issues :-)

Regards,


David