[Samba] SolidWorks 2013 performance problems

[Volker Lendecke]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 09:43:14AM +0300, Paul Tötterman wrote:
> We're having performance problems with SolidWorks on our shares.
> Copying the entire entire solidworks project to local disk and opening
> from there takes around 30s, but opening from the share directly takes
> minutes.
> 
> Apparently solidworks knowledge base has this to say about Samba:
> 
> > The official policy with regards to Linux Samba is that our legal department has advised us that the Open Source Agreement is incompatible with SolidWorks as a commercial organization and as such we are instructed in Technical Support not to support this operating system.
> 
> > In Technical Support our experience with files being accessed from Linux Samba servers is that this in itself can generate instability in SolidWorks.  By the instructions of our legal department we cannot investigate the root cause of these instabilities.
> 
> I'm at a loss how to even debug the performance since the windows
> client seems to behave perfectly reasonably. We're using SolidWorks
> 2013 with the latest patches (service pack 4?), samba 3.6.3-2ubuntu2.2
> from Ubuntu LTS 12.04 and 64bit Windows 7 Pro.
> 
> Any ideas?

So Solidworks is significantly faster if you store the files
on a real Windows SMB share than on a Samba machine?
Copying to a local drive is not really the correct
comparison, the latency differences are dramatic. If so, can
you get us comparative network traces of opening a file on
both machines? It would be best to install wireshark on the
client, start the trace, only after starting the trace
connect to the server, open the file, stop the trace. Do
this with both types of servers. Even if the traces are
huge, that's what we need.

Ah, one difference might be SMB1 vs SMB2. If possible,
upgrade Samba to 3.6.19 and set "max protocol = smb2". There
have been quite a few smb2 related fixes in the 3.6 release
stream. Even better, upgrade to 4.0.10, that brings smb2 by
default.

If you have SMB2 enabled and still see a significant
difference, we need the network traces.

Volker

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