[Samba] Tuning the performance of Samba over LAN network to improve I/O performance

[Miguel Medalha]

> How can I go about configuring my LAN hardware to use Jumbo Frames?
>

That would be a too long conversation and now I don't have the necessary 
energy.
You can Google for Linux Jumbo Frames. You must identify your LAN card 
and see its specifications. Also, you need to be sure that your switches 
support Jumbo Frames.

I am on a Red Hat system and in my case the file 
"/etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth#" contains the following line:

MTU=9014

This is for a Intel Gigabit LAN card.

I don't know it resides in the same place with Ubuntu.

Look for the ifconfig command and study its parameters.


As for hdparm:
You can see your hard disks transfer rates by executing the following:

hdparm -t /dev/hd(x) where x is the letter of your particular drive.

This is for ATA drive. In the case of SATA or SCSI, it would be /dev/sd(x).

This will give you the throughput of your drive *inside* your system. 
You can now try to make your LAN transfers get as close to that as possible.

As an example, in one of my systems the command "hdparm -t /dev/sda" 
gives me the following output:

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffered disk reads:  350 MB in  3.01 seconds = 116.18 MB/sec

I am not in a position now to give you the LAN throughput of this system.

I hope that this helps somewhat.