[Samba] suggestions for a "fast" fileserver - 1G / 10G

Scott Edwards supadupa at gmail.com
Sun Mar 23 21:07:36 MDT 2014


If it's clean 10GBE end to end, have you maxed out the MTU? (use the same
setting on all devices in the same layer2 domain)
I suspect this is the #1 limitation. I see many 10G networks still using
1500ish MTU. (some vendors calculate different parts of the overhead +/-
into MTU. Test test test and test...) Some inferior nics can borrow lots of
CPU usage ( Realtek's are notorious, but hopefully they didn't stick their
nose in 10G space yet). There could be some driver and nic settings like
memory rings/buffers etc, but this either lives on the card or sucks imo.

What kind of cabling, optics, and SFP/XFP's are in use end to end?

Have you monitored cpu usage during this time?
Have you reviewed the interconnected hardware and layer1 specifications
between the server and host(s) in question?
Have you tried other performance testing, such as apache benchmark, iperf,
etc?
Are there any firewalls, even iptables/equiv with permit all? (esp if cpu
usage is in question)
There is some encoding overhead at layer2 (before TCP/IP is even part of
the equation).

HTH, a few things to chase/confirm before focusing on Samba too deeply.

Regards,


Scott.


On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 4:37 AM, Götz Reinicke - IT Koordinator <
goetz.reinicke at filmakademie.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for some recommendations for a "fast" fileserver regarding
> the hardware you use.
>
> We have different fileservers as our requirements changed over time.
>
> The "main" problem we are faced with is, that with smb (windows 7 and OS
> X) clients we never get really close to GBit speed on reads or writes.
> Using the same servers/storages with ftp, ssh, rsync, nfs we are on the
> max. of GBit or with the 10Gbit Storage/server on the max of the storage
> we currently own. (about 400MB/s)
>
> E.g. from my Mac Pro I get smb r/w +- 40MB/s, with ftp I get 90MB/s on a
> 1Gbit Server.
>
> So I try to eliminate some bottle necks. But where are they?
>
> I know there are some protocol overheads etc. comparing smb and e.g. ftp.
>
> So what kind of setup serverside may get better performance? What kind
> of Hardware are you using?
>
> Faster NICs (usually I have INTEL ones) faster cpu? Different generation?
>
>         Any feedback and suggestions are welcome. Regards . Götz
> --
> Götz Reinicke
> IT-Koordinator
>
> Tel. +49 7141 969 82 420
> Fax  +49 7141 969 55 420
> E-Mail goetz.reinicke at filmakademie.de
>
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>
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>
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>
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