[Samba] Samba performance

[Juan Pablo]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to use samba in a small video post production house but we are not 
getting the performance we expected.

Our setup:

- CenOS 5.6 x86-64
- samba.x86_64 (3.0.33-3.29.el5_6.2 and 3.6.0rc1)
- Intel based server (One 4 core Xeon E5620  @ 2.40GHz, 8 GB RAM)
- 4 Intel Gigagit ethernet NIC ports with 802.3ad bonding connected to a switch 
configured tu use 802.3ad
- 8 2TB 7.2 krpm SATA disks with hardware RAID5 (RAID stripe size 1024 bytes, 
controller and disk cache enabled, readahead enabled)
- XFS filesystem (created with the following parameters: size=64k -d 
su=1024k,sw=7)
- Average file size in the share: 8 MByte
- Gigabit network composed by Cat5E certified cabling and DLink DGS-3427 gigabit 
switch.
- Intel I7 based terminals with Intel gigabit NIC, running Windows 7


Test results:

OS access: 

Sequential write (1 x 31 GByte file): 500 MByte/s
Sequential read (1 x 31 GByte file): 780 MByte/s
Write (1000 files 8 MByte each): 249 MByte/s average
Read (1000 files 8 MByte each): 158 MByte/s average
Simultaneous write (4 processes each writing 1000 files of 8 MByte each ): 188 
MByte/s average
Simultaneous read (4 processes each reading 1000 files of 8 MByte each): 118 
MByte/s average

Samba local access (stock CentOS samba 3.0.33 connecting from the same server 
with smbclient):

Sequential read (1 x 31 GByte file):  267 MByte/s
Read (1000 files 8 MByte each): 71 MByte/s average
Simultaneous read (4 processes each reading 1000 files of 8 MByte each): 102 
MByte/s average

Samba local access (Samba 3.6.0rc1 compiled from GIT repo. Connecting from the 
same server with smbclient):

Read (1000 files 8 MByte each): 95 MByte/s average
Simultaneous read (4 processes each reading 1000 files of 8 MByte each): 103 
MByte/s average

Samba server accessed from Windows 7 terminals (samba 3.6.0rc1):

Read (1 terminal copying from samba fileserver to local disk 1000 files 8 MByte 
each): 60 MByte/s average
Simultaneous read (4 terminals each copying from samba fileserver to local disk 
1000 files of 8 MByte each): 70 MByte/s average

Note: Simultaneos read speed is measured adding the size of all transfered files 
and dividing it by the time taken to transfer these files.

I will appreciate any feedback about the results we are getting and advice on 
how to improve this.

Thanks in advance

Juan Pablo