[Samba] Performance regression of Windows clients?

[Giuseppe Lo Presti]

On 15/10/2020 09:46, Ralph Boehme wrote:
> Am 10/15/20 um 9:30 AM schrieb Giuseppe Lo Presti via samba:
>> Anyone knowing what happened at the time within samba-technical (if it
>> can be disclosed)?
> 
> iirc I tried to look into this offlist with the OP and actually spent
> considerable time back then trying to reproduce the issue, but couldn't.
> 
> I can't find the whole thread in my mail archives, only some of my
> responses and it seems the whole thing went nowwhere.
> 
> Generally, Windows Explorer in combination with WIndows kernel SMB VFS
> is quite good at not generating excessive SMB traffic, so I'm a bit
> surprised about that pattern you're describing.

Hello Ralph,

Thanks for having had a look.

For the reproducibility, it should be fairly straightforward with a 
Powershell script as posted at the bottom, and either simply strace smbd 
(just count how many accesses are executed per file), or use wireshark 
as it understands the SMB protocol. Then compare this with the same 
actions performed via bash over a CIFS-mounted path.

We ran the tests with a standalone non-clustered samba (AD member, no DC 
functionality), and we used a local folder on the server, nothing else 
(in particular not a networked file system).

I'm posting this for completeness in case anyone has time/interest to 
look into it.


> I don't have the spare time to look into your problem, sorry. If you
> have the options, you may want to consider using dedicated support:
> 
> <https://www.samba.org/samba/support/globalsupport.html>

Thanks for the pointer, we might consider this in the future.

Cheers,
Giuseppe


----


# PowerShell script to touch and remove 100 files
#
# parameter: target directory (which must exist)

param(
     [parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
     [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]$path
)

# first touch the files
$duration = Measure-Command { 1..100 | ForEach-Object { New-Item -Path 
$path -Name "test.$_" -ItemType File -Force } }
$touchtime_ms = [math]::Round($duration.TotalMilliseconds)

# then remove them
$duration = Measure-Command {Remove-Item -Path $path\* -Force}
$rmtime_ms = [math]::Round($duration.TotalMilliseconds)

Write-Host "Touch time: $touchtime_ms"
Write-Host "Remove time: $rmtime_ms"