Have you tested a non-samba protocol, FTP perhaps? Many ftp programs will give you an estimate of the speed realtime as well, fwiw, although they can be a little buggy at times on estimations.

Andrew Gray wrote:

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
---                                                               ---




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