[Samba] Samba performance for small files

Swift Griggs sgriggs at parsec.com
Mon Jun 15 15:57:18 UTC 2020


On Mon, 15 Jun 2020, Andrea Cucciarre' via samba wrote:
> I have run the same test on a Windows server share (on the same hardware as 
> the Samba share) and the transfer speed is stable, about 404KB/sec which is 
> three time quicker then the overage speed in the Samba share.

Are you doing it on the same hardware, same drive, same everything? Even 
if you are, keep in mind that one of the primary differences would be the 
speed of your underlying filesystem that Samba is using. Optimize that 
filesystem for small files. The usual solution is to go with a filesystem 
that has strong metadata cache control.

Good candidates for this are XFS and ZFS (also Lustre on the high-end for 
clusters). Those all offer some level of metadata cache control. Also, if 
you're using Linux, consider using dm-cache which supercharges your read 
caching.

> So is there any tuning that I can add to the smb.conf to speed up the 
> performance when copying a directory that contains many small files 
> (8-18KB)?

I can't help with the Samba tuning part, hopefully others have decent 
suggestions there. However, another thing to consider is using a streaming 
archiver to transfer the files. Ie.. tar into a pipe over netcat works 
very quickly. That only works if you are doing a full send every time. 
Otherwise, see my first suggestion.

-Swift


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