[Samba] Curious Question about Multiple CIFSD's

[Andy Liebman]

I know this isn't the right place to ask this question, but does anybody 
know if it's possible to force a Linux client machine to spawn multiple 
cifsd's when connecting to a SINGLE Samba Server? I seem to be running 
into some Linux cifs client limits with a single connection. One cifs 
client can talk to multiple Samba servers at around 100 MB/sec 
(aggregate) over a single GigE connection. But the client stumbles 
trying to do more than around 40-45 MB/sec to/from a single Samba Server.

If I connect some "shares" from "Samba Server A" via CIFS and other 
shares via NFS, I can get about double the aggregate throughput that I 
get if I connect all by CIFS. So, the bandwidth between the two machines 
has the potential to be much higher than what I get just by CIFS. And of 
course FTP and RSYNC without encryption shows almost line speed.

I am experimenting with some of the CIFS tunables (cifs_max_pending and 
CIFSMaxBufSize).  For various reasons, I have to mount with "directio" 
so wsize and rsize aren't really relevant.

But it seems the easy way out might be to somehow get multiple cifsd 
processes talking to the same server. Is it possible? What if I give 
more than one IP Address to the SAMBA Server? Can I connect some shares 
to one IP address and other shares to the other IP Address? Will that 
result in more than one cifsd?

Andy Liebman