[Samba] Performance issue with Vista

[Mikko Pukki]

>Hi,
>these problems have been discussed many times in the last weeks.
>Solution: get rid of SO_RCVBUF=8192 and SO_SNDBUF=8192 and your speed 
>will increase.
>modern kernels do a much better job in handling these buffersizes than 
>you can.
>Christoph

And because of those discussions I tried also without changing buffers and I also tried to change them to 16384 (I noticed that in first mail I sent modifiers are on the wrong line but they are correct in actual smb.conf). When at 8192 or 16384 it gave once a burst of 500 Mbit/s but it lasted only for half a second. Maybe something from previous transfer was buffered somewhere (I'm not an expert on CIFS and Vista is quite new for me). After that peak tansfer drops to ~5Mbit/s and rises to 60 Mbit/s and drops again. Average might be close to 40 Mbit/s. Those 60 Mbit peaks seem quite flat topped in task manager. It does this no matter what buffer sizes I have tried. With last configuration I was able to read 25MB/s from smbclient.

If I recall correctly, I got best transfer speeds with smbclient when socket options were default. No matter what the settings are, writing from Vista to Samba is always faster than from another Linux machine using smbclient. I also tried NFS and SCP transfers and they lagged big time behind Samba. Kernel in Linux is 2.6.8-3 if that makes any difference. Would upgrading Samba help? There would only be one problem in updating from 3.0.14a-3s.. All the systems should use Sarge and that is newest version available.

Mikko