Does Samba suck ass...

[Jari]

...or does Samba suck ass?



Come on, the performance downwards is so abysmal that it's not even funny.

The most common tweaks on the Interwebs don't seem to make a difference... but it can't actually suck that bad, can it? Obviously TCP is working, as FTP can achieve very close to wirespeed downwards and bursts up to wirespeed upwards (I guess the server writes its cache to disk during the drops, or something).

[Aali]

thats why i switched my network to NFS a looong time ago

NFS support is kind-of flaky in windows, but it works, and its alot better than using SMB/CIFS

[Jari]

Hmmm... I'll look into that, thanks.

First I'm going to check why Samba has decided to send so HUEG (like an xbox) packets that they have to be fragmented, though. I'm not sure if that is the only reason, or reason at all for the non-existent performance, but the incoming packets are certainly fragmenting like mad.

[The Skillster]

Yep, Samba is mighty slow even on a 3 machine network.
I did see some TCP tweaks on the net, infact I saw some tweaks in this month's Linux Format magazine.
If you want I can dig it out and see what it was, Im sure it wasnt a tcp tweak, more of a exclusive locking tweak.

[Jari]

That would be nice, if it's not too much trouble.

But don't lose any sleep over it; I've tried one or two oplocking settings and they didn't make any difference and I think that this is an actual bug, rather than a case of bad settings. :/

There are like zillions of threads both in Ubuntu and Gentoo forums about same thing (and some other variants of slowness) and it would appear that weirdest things fix it - and usually those fixes work only for the person who discovered it.

I've even tried changing the NIC, but it didn't help either. Maybe a better NIC might have helped, but I have only different flavors of Realteks.


PS. I had a funny experiment; I connected two systems directly, with a regular (non-crossover) CAT5-cable. Mostly to see if NICs have the autosense-ability for regular/crossover-cable that almost all switches seem to have. The results were... interesting. It worked. But it was really, really slow. I dunno if there's some kind of semi-borked autosense in NICs as well, or if they just work (although badly) with incorrect wiring as well.