[Samba] samba slow writing from XP except w/VNC in background

[Robert de Geus]

Hi Scott,
We also observe very bad write performance from all W2K stations to a
linux samba share (1/10th of the expected speed), the other way around
however gives the normal speed. This makes samba as a PDC pretty
useless, for windows clients will be too slow. We tried the following
links, the troughput became a bit better than before, but not good
enough:
http://www.dd.iij4u.or.jp/~okuyamak/Documents/tuning.english.html
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=105185&highlight=nvnet
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=34497

This is what interests me: 
It appears that the winsock implementation of Windows is either crappy,
or working differently than the linux implementation, there are reports
of people who have solved the issue by tuning the smb.conf file, or even
the settings of the ethernet driver using ethertool or specified network
driver settings. Your report of vnc points to a different working of the
TCP stack on either the windows, or the samba side which is affected by
the vnc client. If this solves the problem on the short run, I will give
every W2K station a vnc client just to get rid of the problem.

Could you please clarify what vnc client you use, and on which station
it runs and to which server you connect (My guess is you run the client
on your XP and you connect to the samba server). I might give it a
try....

gr.
Robert

> I fear this is yet another thread that will remain unanswered, but as
> you
> can tell from the subject line there's a twist.

> Basically I am doing an XCOPY from my XP machine to my Linux box running
> samba 3.0.22. 

> Everything works, but it's very slow for the Gigabit Ethernet it's running
> on compared with FTP to the same machine and directory with the same files,
> say 1/10th the speed.

> So I have been modifying smb.conf tweaking, restarting, etc. via VNC and I
> noticed something. When I had VNC in the background, SAMBA was as fast as
> FTP, when it was minimized or not connected, I was back to the slow speeds.

> There's nothing special about my configuration, just the standard install
> with a few shares done through GNOME.

> Any insight would be awesome!

> Thanks,
> Scott