[Samba] Samba Transfer Efficiency (undocumented perf hint for Win7 gives 10X write speeds)

[Linda W]

Holger Rauch wrote:
> Hi Linda,
> 
> thanks a lot for sharing your params; IMHO it's very useful to them in
> combination (Win registry, Samba config, Linux sysctls).
> Would you mind telling us a bit about your client and server HW,
> the Samba server OS and version you use so that your test results
> obtained with dd appear in some context and can be judged better?



Both client machines are connected with Gb ethernet.
XP client with an Intel 5000XVN based motherboard with Dual Xeon 
Core2 Duo's @ 3.2G, w/ 3GB of 667MHz memory.

Win7-64 client is an based on the  Intel 5020SC w/24GB memory 
with 1 Quad Core processor @ 2.7GH, with 1333MHz DDR3 RAM.

Server is a Dell PowerEdge T610 with same processor and memory as 
the workstation, running Suse 11.2, w/vanilla 2.6.34 kernel compiled 
for the machine.
The disks probably don't come into play with the server's cache, 
but we're testing Samba's transfer speed over the network -- so I 
tried to minimize the effect of the disks, anyway.  If you care, 
my my disks transfer speeds are 5x-15x my network transfer speeds 
(depending on if you are looking at the low or high end of the
network speeds).

I allocated large buffers to TCP because I have few clients 
that would be doing things simultaneously and because the server 
isn't too worried about memory.

File system is 'xfs' -- which is best for large multi-terabyte file system.

It also supports NT's ACLs, which I extensively.

Out of curiosity -- I tried using a 256MB transfer size on my
Win7 client -- it made a difference.  For this test, I made sure the
remote file was in the local buffer cache before attempting to read it
so as to only test Samba's efficiency.


Read:
/l> dd if=test1 of=/dev/null bs=256M count=16
16+0 records in
16+0 records out
4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 39.024 s, 110 MB/s

Write:
/l> dd of=test1 if=/dev/zero bs=256M count=16 conv=notrunc oflag=direct
16+0 records in
16+0 records out
4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 37.37 s, 115 MB/s


In both cases, running 'xosview' showed the expected network bandwidth being
used.

Does that answer your questions?

linda