CentOS - Sep 2012 - suggestion for filesystem or general performance optimization

Hi,

recently I noticed, that we have some performance issues regarding our
central samba fileserver. Red Hat EL 5.8, samba3x-3.5.10-0.109.

Doing a rsync, scp or accessing a share from a client and copy large
files (e.g. 3 GB ISO), I do get a read / write average about 60 to 90
MB/sec. So LAN and general hardware can work at max. lan speed.

But copying or syncing small files, e.g. user profiles etc. or doing a
backup of the smaller files lets drop the average performance to 10
MB/Sec or less :(

We use ext3 (noatime), the storage is connected by iscsi, it is a sun
storage with sas harddisk.

All suggestions so far: migrate to ext4 and good luck :)

I read a couple of filesystem comparisons and ext4 looks like the best
option, but what else could I do or expect?

Locking? Limits ... blocksizes, more RAM (4GB installed), we have about
600GB of user data. so not really much...

	Thanks for any suggestion or hint . Regards . G?tz

-- 
G?tz Reinicke
IT-Koordinator

Filmakademie Baden-W?rttemberg GmbH

On 09/04/2012 09:06 AM, G?tz Reinicke wrote:
> Hi,
>
> recently I noticed, that we have some performance issues regarding our
> central samba fileserver. Red Hat EL 5.8, samba3x-3.5.10-0.109.
>
> Doing a rsync, scp or accessing a share from a client and copy large
> files (e.g. 3 GB ISO), I do get a read / write average about 60 to 90
> MB/sec. So LAN and general hardware can work at max. lan speed.
>
> But copying or syncing small files, e.g. user profiles etc. or doing a
> backup of the smaller files lets drop the average performance to 10
> MB/Sec or less :(
>
> We use ext3 (noatime), the storage is connected by iscsi, it is a sun
> storage with sas harddisk.
>
> All suggestions so far: migrate to ext4 and good luck :)
>
> I read a couple of filesystem comparisons and ext4 looks like the best
> option, but what else could I do or expect?
>
> Locking? Limits ... blocksizes, more RAM (4GB installed), we have about
> 600GB of user data. so not really much...
>
> 	Thanks for any suggestion or hint . Regards . G?tz
>
>
I recognize this. Also using 5.8. Simply removing a few hundred GB of
small files can take half an hour. Removing the same amount of data
consumed by a couple of big files is less than a minute (even that is
slow, why not remove the index somewhere in the file system?)
One thing that did speed up things was using a solid stated disk because
of the much lower random access time. That's most likely not an option
for you...

So I am also interested in any answer.