[Samba] Weird Samba upload performance on Gigabit network

[David Harrison]

On 13/11/2006, at 2:00 AM, Michael Gasch wrote:

> are you by any chance running OSX 10.4.8?
> we had the same problem and it was related to samba & OSX (10.4.8).  
> OSX to an W2k3-Server was fine. so we thought it might be samba.  
> but after downgrading OSX to 10.4.7 everything was fine again. so  
> the apple update must have changed/ broken something. we did not  
> look deeper into it. on google groups we found one posting with the  
> same problem but between OSX and W2k. ftp, etc. was fine on OSX,  
> only smb/ cifs was slow
>
> David Harrison wrote:
>> Here's a weird one that may have nothing to do with Samba and more  
>> to do with network frame sizes.
>> I have recently upgraded the network infrastructure to support  
>> gigabit speeds.
>> - OSX Tiger to OSX Tiger file transfers operate at gigabit speeds.
>> - Samba 3.0.23C (Suse 10) to OSX Tiger file transfers operate at  
>> gigabit speeds.
>> - 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.

Yes I am running 10.4.8 on the clients.
Just as a test I have mounted the Samba volume from the command line  
(with mount.cifs and mount.smbfs) and received the same performance  
as through the Finder so if the problem is with 10.4.8 its at a  
fairly low level.

My money's still on the gigabit network card on the Samba machine,  
once the new card arrives I'll not only be able to test it with  
10.4.8 but also run some gigabit transfer tests from Linux machine to  
Linux machine which should clearly identify where the problem lies.


David