Re: Writes to samba server very, very slow

[Tim Hammerquist <tim+openbsd-misc_(_at_)_vegeta_(_dot_)_ath_(_dot_)_cx>]

Gary Clemans-Gibbon wrote:
> David Gwynne wrote:
> > Gary Clemans-Gibbon wrote:
> > > Everything is working fine except that when I copy files to the
> > > box from a Windows XP box the transfers are very slow, like
> > > 9 minutes for a  48 Mb file. Copying the same file back to the win
> > > box is quick - a couple  of seconds as you'd expect.
> > 
> > I would suggest looking at the socket options parameter in
> > /etc/samba/ smb.conf. I have the following in my smb.conf and
> > transfer speeds  seem to perform a lot better now:
> >
> > socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
> 
> I just tried that line but it seems to be the same or if anything it
> seems even slower.

Gary,

I've seen this same phenomenon when copying to from my OSX Powerbook and
my fileserver (running both FreeBSD 5 and Gentoo Linux), with the OSX
acting as samba client.

The transfer speeds are not "slightly" slower, they are slower by orders
of magnitude, with normally 20sec transfers taking 10-20 minutes.
I watch the progress meter slowly incrementing at the rate of 32-64k/sec
over a 100bTX link.  Does this sound like your issue?

In my setup, I had limited success merely unmounting and remounting the
share; that worked maybe 50% of the time.  Also, the rate seemed to be
normal more often if I had a simultaneous ssh connection between the
same two machines, even if the ssh connection were idle.  I was not able
to find any consistently effective solution.

After googling many times over several months, finding nothing more than
the same advice you got about TCP_NODELAY and the SO_*BUF settings
(which did not affect performance in my case either), I finally gave up,
switching to NFS and/or scp.

For what it's worth, I haven't noticed this since I upgraded my
powerbook to OSX 10.4, so it might have something to do with the client
OS, network stack, or Samba version.

I apologize for not having anything solid to recommend.  But I wanted to
let you know that this *has* happened to others; you're not imagining
it.

Tim Hammerquist