[Samba] Samba async performance - bottleneck or bug?

[David Disseldorp]

Hi,

On Fri, 19 Jul 2019 23:26:55 +0000, douxevip wrote:

> So to summarize, this is the situation:
> 
> 1) I run a fio benchmark requesting, small, random, async writes. Command is "fio --direct=1 --sync=0 --rw=randwrite --bs=4K --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --group_reporting --name=sambatest --size=32k --time_based". I run this command on both the host, as on the Samba client, both on the same exact ZFS dataset
> 
> 2) The ZFS dataset only writes async, converting sync to async writes at all times
> 
> 3) That same dataset being shared through Samba, also only performs async writes (strict sync = no)
> 
> 4) With these settings, on the host the benchmarks tops out at 520MB/s. On the Samba client (again, writing to the same end destination) I get 40 MB/s tops. I feel like those benchmark scores should be much closer given the above test.
> 
> 
> I've ruled out the network being an issue since a) they're hosted on the same host via a Linux bridge (which means it never leaves the box) and b)an iperf3 test with a single thread completed the benchmark at 44Gbit/s.
> 
> 
> I guess that leaves one question: where is the bottleneck here, and is there perhaps another method to speed up these small writes for the sake of experimentation?

You're still using direct I/O with fio, which will likely disallow
client side caching with oplocks/leases.
I'd recommend checking that your (cifs.ko?) client is using a relatively
modern SMB2+ dialect and that leases are enabled on both sides. I
unfortunately don't have time ATM to analyse this further.

Cheers, David