Here's a couple suggestions that we've played with. - What kernel are you running on your Samba box? We got significantly better performance when we switched to 2.6.5 over 2.4.22. - Do you have debugging turned on in Samba? Or anything other than log level = 0? That can slow things down a fair bit as well.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander Lazarevich" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Samba Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 3:30 PM Subject: [Samba] Performance: Samba 3 vs. Windows 2003 > Samba guru's: > > Our Samba 3 network performance is half that of Windows 2003 Server. I > really want to stay with samba/unix, but half the performance? I'm hoping > someone can point me in the right direction so we can keep using > samba/unix. I'll try to give as much detail without giving pages and > pages of benchmark numbers. If someone wants to see numbers, I'll send > them: > > Fileserver is Dell PE2600, Dual Xeon 18GHz, 2GB memory, Gig NIC. System > is dual boot RHEL3-AS with an ext3 filesystem and Windows 2003 Server > with NTFS. The fileserving disk is a SATA-SCSI RAID enclosure. Bonnie++ > and iozone both show that the RAID enclosure can do 80MB/sec writes and > 40MB/sec reads on the ext3 in linux. Benchmarks in windows 2003 are very > similar. Why it gets faster writes than read, I don't know, and I don't > care right now. What I'm worried about is our samba network performance. > > Clients are Windows XP/2K/NT4 pro with all patches installed and Gig NICs. > All the clients can netperf to the server at 60+MB/sec, some even faster. > No collisions on the NICs, nothing wrong with the network. There is a > cisco Gig switch inbetween the client and the server as well. > > Here is the bottom line: > > When the server is running samba 3, the clients get 12-13MB/sec. > > When the server is running windows 2003, the clients get 24-26MB/sec. > > Keep in mind the server hardware is exactly the same, the only thing I > change is the software. Windows 2003 beets up Samba 3, hands down. > > However, all this testing is done by just drag and drop, and looking at > the clock to time it. Not the best way to do it, but I don't know of > another way now, suggestions welcome. The difference is obvious and > consistent: 500MB file in samba 3 writes to disk in 42 seconds, but writes > to windows 2003 disk in 21 seconds. I can produce the same results on all > of our clients any time of the day. > > I've tried changing the smb.conf socket options (TCP_NODELAY, SO_SNDBUF, > etc.) to 65523, 242xxx, whatever. /etc/init.d/smb restart, then try again. > No change in performance whatsoever. Still 12-13MB/sec. I've also set > other options in smb.conf, such as xmit, write size, read size, but > nothing seems to change the fact that samba 3 can't do more than > 12-13MB/sec. > > I've also searched the list, and found some people had success in > performance issues by changing the SO_SNDBUF, but they didn't list any > benchmark numbers. Maybe they were happy with 12-13MB/sec, but I'm not, > especially if something else can get 25MB/sec. > > Any input is welcome. > > Alex > --- --- > Alex Lazarevich | Systems Administrator | Imaging Technology Group > Beckman Institute | University of Illinois | www.itg.uiuc.edu > --- --- > > > > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the > instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba > -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba