[Samba] Samba 3.0.37 Performance issue

[Martin Rootes]

Hi,

up until the summer we were running a very old version of Samba in a 
zone on a Sun V890 running Solaris 10 in a cluster. As we we moving over 
to a Windows 7 desktop in the summer I set up a new zone running Samba 
3.0.37 that accesses the same filesystem containing the users home 
directories. This seemed to be working fairly reasonably until the start 
of term since when we have been having severe performance issues when 
using the new version and have had to revert back to the old version. 
Apart from the version change the old version used the smbpasswd file 
authentication method whereas the new version uses AD authentication, 
although I can't see that this should cause a massive issue. I've had a 
look at some config options (deadtime = 5, socket options = TCP_NODELAY 
and change notify = no*) to see whether I can improve performance but so 
far nothing seems to have helped. Are there likely to be any great 
performance advantages in upgrading Samba to 3.5.8, or do I need to look 
at further configuration tweaks. The trouble is that the only way I can 
reliably test to see if anything works is to put it in to the live 
environment and just monitor the system and switch back as soon as 
problems start arising. Also as upgrading to 3.5.8 will involve 
installing multiple patches on all 4 nodes in the cluster and so I'd 
only want to go down that route if there is a definite (and 
considerable) performance advantage of 3.5.8 over 3.0.37. Alternately is 
there anything else I could look at in the configuration file to help 
improve performance?

     Martin Rootes.

(*) I tried "change notify = no" as in the Samba 2 config I'd used 
"change notify timeout = 3000" to cure a performance issue, but Samba 3 
doesn't have the "change notify timeout" option and so I thought I'd see 
whether "change notify = no" would have a similar effect (it didn't).