[Samba] Samba 3: bad read performance

[Jeremy Allison]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 03:46:56PM +0400, Dmitry V Shurupov wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> 
> We use Samba 3 server for some video stuff (editing, rendering, and so
> on) -- that's why performance is critical. We've tried a lot smb.conf
> options, but Samba can't satisfy our requirements.
> 
> 
> Our server configuration is as following:
> * Hard drive: RAID5 (8 x Seagate 7200.10), 3ware 9550SX-8LP controller
> * NICs (trunked): 2 x Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5704
> * Processor: Opteron 270
> * RAM: 4 Gb
> * File system: XFS
> * Operating system: Gentoo Linux (kernel 2.6.24-r3)
> * Samba version: 3.0.28, 3.0.28a
> 
> Our client configuration is as following:
> * Processor: 2 x Opteron 270
> * RAM: 4 Gb
> * NICs (trunked): 2 x Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5704, 4 x NIC Intel
> Corporation 82546GB.
> * Operating system: Gentoo Linux (kernel 2.6.23-r9)
> 
> (We test Samba with our router to get better results.)
> 
> Our server & client are connected with Allied Telesis AT-9448T/SP.
> 
> 
> And... Our testing results (MByte/s):
> 
>            Read   Write
>  disk       190     135
>  ftp        111     111
>  samba       23      90
> 
> (With 5 connections we get the same: 5 x 23 MByte/s.)
> 
> We've tested our Samba server with:
> 
> 1) time cat file > /dev/null (on mounted SMB directory)
> 2) bonnie & bonnie++ (on mounted SMB directory)
> 3) time cp file /tmp/file (on mounted SMB directory)
> 4) smbclient
> 
> We've tried SMBFS and CIFS, different oplock and socket options ("read"
> performance varies from 17 to 25 MByte/s).

Can you test the latest CIFSFS code from Steve French, as well
as the latest Samba 3.2 code ? We've added the ability for
CIFSFS to do 16mb streaming read/writes, which should significantly
help a set up like yours.

Jeremy.