[Samba] Samba performance for small files

[Andrea Cucciarre']

Hello Swift,

the filesystem is just ZFS on flash storage, so filesystem and storage 
shouldn't be an issue.
That's why I suspect the bottleneck is Samba.

Regards
Andrea Cucciarre'

On 6/15/2020 5:57 PM, Swift Griggs via samba wrote:
> 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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