[Samba] Performance issue with Vista

[Mikko Pukki]

Hi,

I tested a little bit Samba with Windows vista and found serious performance issue regarding reading large files from Samba server. Computers that I tested Samba with were all identical computers equipped with 2,8 GHz Pentium D processors, 1 GB memory and 1 Gbit/s LAN. All computers have only external USB hard drives so that it is easier to change from operating system to another.

First I tested performance with 160 MB tar.gz file and there were no problems. SMBClient from another Linux computer reads and writes about 45 MB/s. Performance on Vista Client was higher than this. Write was just a little bit under 50 MB/s and read 48 MB/s. Then I moved to larger files to make sure that I would get results that simulate better the environment, where I need Samba myself (Saving and reading 500-1000 MB images from and to Photoshop)
. I chose 690MB Knoppix image. Read and write from SMBclient were 27 to 28 MB/s at average. Writing from Vista bursts at 50 MB/s and minimum was 28 MB/s leading to over 30 MB/s average. _Then to the problem_: Reading from Samba share gave bursts of 6 MB/s and repeated drops to 0,5 MB/s.

I have same kind of problem also at home (at the moment 100 MB/s network) using same version of samba and nearly identical configuration file. SMBClient reads and writes ok but performance from Windows XP is poor (but in this case both reading and writing)

Has anyone else encountered same behaviour and is there any workarounds for this. Linux systems that I use are Debian Sarge 3.1r5 and Samba version is 3.0.14a-3s.

Thanks in advance,
Mikko Pukki

smb.conf global settings:

[global]
   workgroup = *********
   server string = %h server (Samba %v)
   dns proxy = no
   log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
   max log size = 1000
   syslog = 0
   panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d
   encrypt passwords = true  
   passdb backend = tdbsam guest
   obey pam restrictions = yes
   invalid users = root
   passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u
   passwd chat = *Enter\snew\sUNIX\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\sUNIX\spassword:* %n\n .

         SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
   socket options = TCP_NODELAY