[Samba] Question on how to get Samba to use larger pread/write calls.

[Chris Duffy]

We are testing Samba 3 (and 4) on Fedora Core 13,
10Gbit connection with a Mac OS 10.6.4 system
as the client.  We will be adding some Windows
machines sooner or later with 10Gbit interfaces.

We are seeing 100-150MBytes/sec read or write
performance between the Mac and the FC13 system
over 10Gbit interface but it should be capable of
400-500MBytes/sec.  We have a local raid
on the FC13 system that runs 1GByte/sec locally
using an Areca 1880-ix-16 raid card (6Gbit version).
It has 16 fast Hitachi disks in a Raid5 format
using xfs filesystem.

The problem here is that samba is poking the Areca
at 128KByte I/O's on preads and writes, i.e.
shown to us using strace on the smbd daemons
that are running.  Using vmstat/iostat/sar utilities,
we see 100% utilization of the Areca card because the
average wait time is real high and the average
queue length to it is also high......too many
small I/O's.....
This is not the case if I run "fio" or "dd" locally
to/from the Areca's raid using 1-4MByte I/O's.
I see fast I/O...

I do not see any way to increase the size of Samba's
pread/write's in the smb.conf documentation.  I
am sure it may be just a matter of getting the source
code and making some changes to allow larger
sized IO's but........and of course I suppose Windows
clients may complain but....

I remember that back in the old Irix days with the
group of engineers in Australia I worked with,
we had Samba screaming fast but not sure if they
tweaked the version of Samba on Irix to do this.

Can you guys come up with a way for us to allow
the reads/writes to/from the disks to be tunable
up to say 4MB in size?

Thx
chris duffy