[Samba] Samba 3: bad read performance

[Ryan Bair]

I've been doing just fine with my broadcoms on my server. The
performance killer is probably CIFS module on the client. That has
never had very good performance, but it has come a long way. I use
NFSv4 on my Linux clients and Samba for Windows.

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Adam Williams
<awilliam at mdah.state.ms.us> wrote:
> Broadcom cards are known to be not so great (on Dell Poweredge servers
> anyway).  I'd probably replace them with some gigabit intel NICs in the
> server and make sure the client's tcp/ip packets are flowing out of the
> intel NICs to it also and see if that helps.
>
>
>
>  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).
> >
> >
> > Samba HOWTO tells:
> >
> >
> > > The Samba server uses TCP to talk to the client, so if you are trying
> > >
> > >
> > to see if it performs well, you should really compare it to programs
> > that use the same protocol. The most readily available programs for file
> > transfer that use TCP are ftp or another TCP-based SMB server.
> (http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/speed.html#id2687128)
> >
> > So, our Samba "read" results are really sad. What can we do to make
> > Samba perform better?
> >
> >
> >
> >
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