Thanks for so many helpful replies and sharing your experience! You guys are great!
First of all, my network is a Gigabit switch and everything plugs into that. It's just a little test lab at the moment. I tried another Linux client machine in place of the 'black box' Linux client, so I could fiddle with the client settings. I tuned the smbclient mount options, you can increase rsize, wsize (default is 16K I think, I've set mine to 65K), I also added the options block,nobrl,forcedirectio, and made the mount read-only. I also tuned the Samba server as per Jeff Wasilko's note, "Try looking at page 126 in [IBM Linux Performance Tuning guide]" http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4285.pdf and followed their recommendations. Result: Using smbget, I now pull: Linux client - Linux server at 372 Mbps; Linux client - Windows server 412 Mbps. (That transfer rate is the file size divided by transfer time.) This transfer rate is satisfactory for us. Case closed. :) P.S. As part of the investigation I made sure I had 1000 Mpbs Full Duplex and no errors on the interfaces. I also used tcpdump (some folks suggested Wireshark). The client side was using cifs implementation, not smbfs. I didn't get to play with sendfile or "max xmit" settings or jumbo frames since I already achieved a satisfactory rate. Thanks again for your help! This was a fun one. Sincerely, Aleksey _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
