[Samba] Samba write performance in kernel

[Volker Lendecke]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 02:43:25PM +0800, Lin Mac wrote:
> well, in my condition, it might be 30% instead of 5%, IF
> splice can cover advantage 1 and 2.
> 1. I'm using a slow CPU (FA526) , and the memory copy is even slower. 
> 2. The reading performance is over 7 MB/s, with mmap and
> sendfile enabled, while writing is only 4-5 MB/s. Without
> mmap and sendfile, reading from samba is also about 4-5
> MB/s. 
> 3. I used Oprofile to profile writing file to samba and
> found that CPU takes over 30% CPU time on
> copy_from/to_user, so I think going to user space and back
> again is the bottleneck.
> 4. My device is only 100Mbps Ethernet
> 5. I uses Windows client to measure throughput

Ok, this is different. I had missed that you are talking
about a small device with slow memory bandwith. In that
case, you might certainly gain something by avoiding the
copies. If you are really memcpy-bound, you should
definitely make splice work.

> > here, but the network latencies together with non-optimally
> > queued requests by the client have a MUCH greater influence.
> 1. If splice works, can memory copy be avoided?
> 2. Sorry I don't really get what the "non-optimally queued
> requests" means. And what could I do to make it optimized?

At the high end, latencies is mostly what kills your
performance. Mostly you have enough bandwidth, but if you
just do a simple request->response scheme, you can't get
beyond a certain overall bandwith that is way below the
theoretical network bandwith. To fill that, you need to make
the client issue parallel requests. Multi-threaded windows
client apps can do it, smbclient from 3.2 does it.

Volker
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