[Samba] Performance with XP64

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 09:24:21PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> What sort of performance is expected over GigE, with Samba 3 as the
> server and XP64 as the client?  I havn't been able to find any current
> benchmarks at all.
> 
> http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2010-June/156708.html talks about
> the same configuration, and suggests that the protocol should be able
> to break 100MB/sec.  (Unfortunately, the poster disappeared without
> following up.)  Focusing on read throughput (Samba to XP64), I see
> about the same performance as he did, around 50 MB/sec; with HTTP
> 97.7M/sec.  Modern HDDs can regularly hit 100MB/sec, so halving
> throughput for large file copies is painful.

I've worked with OEM's to get more than 100MB/sec on their NAS devices.
Using the Intel NAS benchmark.

> I've always assumed this was just a limitation of the protocol on a
> link much faster than it was designed for, but that post suggests
> otherwise.  He didn't mention if the Server 2008 system he was
> comparing against had large frames enabled, though, which I've never
> had much luck with.
> 
> (I'll wait until asked before digging out hardware/configuration info,
> traces and so on; if the performance I'm seeing is already optimal
> then I won't bother.  I'm on 3.4.0, which is what's packaged with my
> version of Ubuntu; I'll also try upgrading to 3.5.x if that's likely
> to help.)

Have you enabled sendfile ?

Jeremy.