[Samba] Samba Tuning to increase Throughput

[Linda Walsh]

vijay vijay wrote:
> Hi All, 
>  
> I have gone through threads related to throughput issue in this list. Found few 
> similar issue, but could not get the solution. 
> 
> So looking for some advice from group.
>  
> I am trying to use the samba to access a USB disk connected to our evaluation 
> board which has xtensa core running at 400 MHz. 
> 
> Samba 3.5.x is running on the board. We are getting below throughput as tested 
> with the colasoft capsa software on the client PC. 
> 
> Read:    27.9 mbps
> Write :  24.5 mbps
>   
> I was trying to find the where the bottleneck is? Initially thought issue could 
> be at the USB, 
> 
> But when we tested only USB (without samba) throughput it was coming 
> Read:    162.5 mbps
> Write :  80 mbps
> So with this it appears that some bottleneck is because of the use of samba. 
>  
> When I tried to access same USB disk with Linux using samba, throughput was 
> more.
> Read:    157.9 mbps
> Write :  134.5 mbps
>  
> So it appears that samba is not correctly configured on my board .  
> Any pointers what we should investigate in this? 
> Any help would be highly appreciated?

With samba you are getting a read speed of 157.9mbps and the disk 
is only capable of 162.5mpbs, while with samba you can write at 134.5mpbs
and the disk is only capable of 80mpbs?

Seems like you have a problem on the client, as with samba you say
your read speed is 97% the maximum offered by the USB disk and
the write speed is 68% faster using 'samba' than when you write to
it directly (not quite sure how samba accomplishes that, but 
it IS great software, I guess!)


Can you elaborate further as to the problem?  As it seems you are saying
you have some client running at 400Mhz, (about 1/7th the speed of a
modern PC, and are only getting about 1/7th the throughput).   Seems like
the client might be a bit underpowered, or what are you saying?

FWIW -- if you need to optimize speed on a fast connection, (1Gbps), you need
to increase your TCP buffers on the linux computer and increase the TCP window
size on most windows clients -- though I note that you didn't say what windows
client you have running on this 400MHz computer, Windows 98?  XP?

Linda