[Samba] Diagnosing Performance Issues

[Shane Arnold]

  Hi All,

First off my apologies if this is the wrong place to be asking.

I seem to have a problem where the smbd process is using a massive 
amount of CPU for network transfers. It averages about 70-90% usage on 
both cores of a dual-core machine when transferring between disks (or 
over the network) using samba/cifs shares.

Along with this I also notice the transfers going from a steady 
30-40mb/sec to anywhere from 1-4MB/sec. It seems to resolve itself then 
re-occur multiple times during a transfer. I have tried tweaking buffer 
settings and the like with no success.

iostat shows corresponding transfer rates that match what Windows is 
reporting for transfer speeds.

Any ideas where I can start looking? I've done a fair bit of looking, 
but I'm not quite ready to say it's a hardware problem just yet.

Cheers :)