Hello, And thank you all for the answers!
In order to not have to interpolate the various informations, I will summarize: My initial question: I have a NetBSD server serving FFSv2 filesystems via Samba (last pkgsrc version) through a 1000T ethernet card to a bunch of Windows clients, heterogeneous, both as OS version and as ethernet cards, ranging from 10T to 1000T. All the nodes are connected to a Cisco switch. The network performances (for Samba) seem poor and I wonder how the various ethernet speeds (10 to 1000) could affect the performance, impacting the negociations on the server auto-select 1000T card. >From your answers (the details given are worth reading, and someone reading this should return to the whole answers. I'm just summarizing, if I'm not mistaken): 1) The negociations are done by the switch, and the server card doesn't handle it by itself; 2) On the server, the capabilities of the disks serving should be determined; 3) On the server, Samba is not multithreaded and spawning an instance for each connection, so even on a multicore perhaps not using all the cores and even if it does, the instances are still concurrent; 4) The measure of the network performances should be determined by using for example iperf3 available on pkgsrc. >From your questions about precisions: For the switch: a) The switch is a Cisco gigabit 16 ports switch (RV325) able of handling simultaneous full-duplex gigabit on all the ports; b) The cards are correctly detected to their maximum speed on the switch: the leds indicate correctly gigabit for the correct cards, and not gigabit (no difference between 10T and 100T) for the others. For the poor performances: a) On a Windows (10 if I remember---I'm not on site), with a Gigabit Ethernet card, downloading from a Samba share gives a 12MB/s that is the max performance of a 100T card; uploading to the server via Samba gives a 3MB/s; b) Testing on another Windows node with a 100T card, I have the same throughput copying via Samba or using ftp. With all your help and from this summary, I suspect that the probable culprit is 3) above (linked also to 2) but mainly 3): an instance of Samba, serving a 10T or a 100T request is blocking on I/O, specially on writing (sync?), the other instances waiting for a chance to have a slice of CPU? That is, the problem is probably with caching and syncing ---there are some Samba parameters in the config file but the whole is a bit cryptic... And I'd like to use NFS, but Microsoft allowing and then dropping, I don't know if the NFS client on Windows can still be installed without requiring to install a full Linux based distribution... Thank you all! once again. Best regards, -- Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> http://www.kergis.com/ http://www.sbfa.fr/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C