[Samba] Performance Degradation when copying >1500 files to mac

Jeremy Allison jra at samba.org
Fri May 29 20:58:23 UTC 2020


On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 04:02:53PM -0700, Christian Kuntz via samba wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm running into a significant performance issue where copying a couple
> thousand <3kb files from my stretch SMB server to a mac client. Dragging +
> dropping the files from the gui results in a long period of time in which
> the client is "preparing to copy" and then actually transferring, during
> this time transfer starts around 300MB/s, then after around 5-10 seconds
> drops to <50MB/s and eventually recovers after a few minutes. The more
> files being copied, the more pronounced the drop off is and the slower the
> bandwidth. If two clients are doing the copy at the same time, they'll both
> slow eachother down significantly, even if it's done manually via cp on the
> command line.
> 
> The server is running debian stretch, SMB 4.5, backed by ZFS 0.7.13. The
> mac os client is running Darwin 18.7.0 (have also tested and confirmed
> behavior on Mojave 10.14.6) and writing to SSD, and I confirmed that
> comparable FS operations locally do not incur the performance penalty, only
> from SMB to disk.
> 
> iperf gives the connection speed its full line rate of 10gbps, and disk
> read performance of the smb server is >10gbps.
> 
> I've tested the same operations from linux <-> linux via the smb share, but
> no performance drop off was seen. Further, copying large files back and
> forth also saw no problem.
> 
> I'm wondering if anyone might have any knowledge as to particular smb
> client configuration settings on the mac side that may help alleviate this
> issue, or if this is a known problem with current mac smb clients?

Are you using vfs_fruit on the Mac's ? Samba 4.5 is a little old,
I don't think it uses pthread aio by default.

If you're willing to get a little more adventurous then the latest
Samba does async io by default and also has io_uring available
(which just got a fix with latest kernel issues).



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