Conclusion - Re: [Samba] Transfer rates faster than 23MBps?

[Mark Smith]

In the interest of closing this loop for the sake of the archives...  :)

My company has officially thrown in the towel on this issue.  Everything 
we're seeing is suggesting that 22MBps is about as fast as we're going 
to get with SMB.  RedHat, our parent company's IT department (much 
bigger than ours), the (read: this) Samba Mailing List, and all my 
techie friends, all agree that we're at a limit.

For the parts of our process where higher speed is critical, we'll look 
into replacing SMB with a more appropriate protocol (eg: FTP or SCP 
hacked to allow a cipher of "none").

I want to thank everyone who tried to help with suggestions of things to 
try, areas to look, and what-not.  Every time, I'd see something and say 
"Huh.  Haven't tried that!" and got hopeful.  Alas, none of it ended up 
helping, but that's not y'all's fault.  :)

Again, thanks everyone for your help.  Cheers.

-Mark

Mark Smith wrote:
> We use SMB to transfer large files (between 1GB and 5GB) from RedHat AS4 
> Content Storage servers to Windows clients with 6 DVD burners and 
> robotic arms and other cool gadgets.  The servers used to be Windows 
> based, but we're migrating to RedHat for a host of reasons.
> 
> Unfortunately, the RedHat Samba servers are about 2.5 times slower than 
> the Windows servers.  Windows will copy a 1GB file in about 30 seconds, 
> where as it takes about 70 to 75 seconds to copy the same file from a 
> RedHat Samba server.
> 
> I've asked Dr. Google and gotten all kinds of suggestions, most of which 
> have already been applied by RedHat to the stock Samba config.  I've 
> opened a ticket with RedHat.  They pointed out a couple errors in my 
> config, but fixing those didn't have any effect.  Some tweaking, 
> however, has gotten the transfer speed to about 50 seconds for that 1GB 
> file.
> 
> But I seem to have hit a brick wall; my fastest time ever was 44 
> seconds, but typically it's around 50.
> 
> I know it's not a problem with network or disk; if I use Apache and HTTP 
> to transfer the same file from the same server, it transfers in about 15 
> to 20 seconds.  Unfortunately, HTTP doesn't meet our other requirements 
> for random access to the file.
> 
> Do you folks use Samba for large file transfers at all?  Have you had 
> any luck speeding it up past about 23MBps (the 44 second transfer 
> speed)?  Any help you may have would be fantastic.  Thanks.
> 
> -Mark