[Samba] Samba SMB throughput

[Mahmud Siddiqi]

> In that test I did see >700 megabytes per second, certainly
> over 10GbE on pretty powerful hardware. One of those raw tcp
> throughput testers showed the hardware does around 800
> megabytes per second. The trick was to read from a huge RAM
> disk together with a well-tuned smbclient from 3.2 to do
> multi-issue of SMB requests. This was really a test to see
> how much overhead smbd alone does.
> 
> Volker


I figured that 10GbE was used. Was that throughput to a single client, or was
it aggregate at the server?

More details on my situation --

I typically see 35MB/sec over my current 1GbE lines. Clients are WinXP32,
WinXP64, and soon Win7. Disk rates exceed 500MB/sec (RAIDs). Server is Samba
3.0.2x on Mac OSX Server with XRAID SAN. 

I would really like to see 80-90 MB/sec with my current setup, which I could
reach before XP SP3 (we'll put in 10GbE lines sooner or later). I am seriously
considering bringing up a new Linux server running Samba 3.5 for performance
and other reasons, since Apple is in no hurry to update Samba in OSX. However,
I am by no means an SMB expert, so any advice for tuning either my current 
clients and server, or the potential new server would be greatly appreciated
(e.g., how would I set Windows for multi-issue of SMB requests?).

I have implemented the relevant tweaks for Windows clients that I've found in 
the Samba documentation, but no performance increase was seen. I am also in the
enviable position of having a network with no packet loss, virtually no
latency, and virtually no collisions, so the usual buffering tweaks don't
help....  

Mahmud