samba - Sep 2002 - Probably a stupid question about smbfs and smb.conf.

This seems like it should have an obvious answer, but I haven't seen a
clear word one way or the other in the man pages or other documentation
that I have read - is smbmount's behavior in any way governed by the
smb.conf file?

The reason I ask is one of the other sysadmins here has been trying to
figure out ways to improve smbfs performance, and he came across the
speed.txt file in Samba's documentation.  However, this file seems
geared towards Samba being used as a server, which we do not do (we only
use smbmount to mount Windows network shares as smbfs).  I wondered if
any of the advice in that file might still apply to a Linux smbfs
client, and that got me wondering if even anything at all in smb.conf
applies to smbmount.

As a test, I tried mounting a Windows network share on linux
workstation, after removing smb.conf.  smbmount complained about the
missing configuration file, but the share was still successfully
mounted.

So, really I have two questions.  1, does smbmount require smb.conf?  2,
are there ways to tweak performance of an smbfs client, and if so, is
there related documentation?

Thank you for your time.

---Kris Kelley

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kris Kelley" <kkelley@simdesk.com>
To: "Samba Mailing List" <samba@lists.samba.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 10:10 PM
Subject: [Samba] Probably a stupid question about smbfs and smb.conf.

> This seems like it should have an obvious answer, but I haven't seen a
> clear word one way or the other in the man pages or other documentation
> that I have read - is smbmount's behavior in any way governed by the
> smb.conf file?
> 
plain & simple : no.

I can't say in no way whatsoever, but, smbmount, at least originally, had
nothing to do with the samba people. smbmount was (and, I think, still is)
a linux thing, whereas samba was a unix thing, which also worked on linux.
So, the answer is, smbmount is likely not influenced much by smb.conf.

About tweaking for improved performance, I would 
man smbmount
/    ttl 
and
/socket

Joel



On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 03:10:54PM -0500, Kris Kelley
wrote:
> This seems like it should have an obvious answer, but I haven't seen a
> clear word one way or the other in the man pages or other documentation
> that I have read - is smbmount's behavior in any way governed by the
> smb.conf file?
> 
> The reason I ask is one of the other sysadmins here has been trying to
> figure out ways to improve smbfs performance, and he came across the
> speed.txt file in Samba's documentation.  However, this file seems
> geared towards Samba being used as a server, which we do not do (we only
> use smbmount to mount Windows network shares as smbfs).  I wondered if
> any of the advice in that file might still apply to a Linux smbfs
> client, and that got me wondering if even anything at all in smb.conf
> applies to smbmount.
> 
> As a test, I tried mounting a Windows network share on linux
> workstation, after removing smb.conf.  smbmount complained about the
> missing configuration file, but the share was still successfully
> mounted.
> 
> So, really I have two questions.  1, does smbmount require smb.conf?  2,
> are there ways to tweak performance of an smbfs client, and if so, is
> there related documentation?
> 
> Thank you for your time.
> 
> ---Kris Kelley
> 
> -- 
> To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
> instructions:  http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Kris Kelley wrote:
> So, really I have two questions.  1, does smbmount require smb.conf?  2,
> are there ways to tweak performance of an smbfs client, and if so, is
> there related documentation?
smb.conf is not required. I think your own test clearly shows that, no?

But smbmount does pick default values from it, for workgroup, socket
options, debug level and a few others. All the ones I know of also have
mount options to match, example from the smbmount manpage:

       sockopt=<arg>
              sets  the  TCP  socket  options.  See  the smb.conf
              socket options option.


Not sure what you are trying to optimise (read/write/latency/throughput). 

The 2.4 smbfs network code goes back a long time and is not the greatest.
It can be very unfair if you have multiple simultaneous users and because
it will only have one request active at any one time it degrades a lot
when round trip time increases.

If you are looking at raw transfer speed, here is a silly example on
2.4.19 on an otherwise idle switched 100Mbps network, win2k server,
700MHz PIII, reading a file that's probably in cache on the server:

$ ls -l /mnt/smb/TS122.0/DB2/NODE0000/CATN0000/20020607/104221.001
... 146833408 Jun  7 10:43 ...
$ time cp /mnt/smb/TS122.0/DB2/NODE0000/CATN0000/20020607/104221.001 /dev/null
0.030u 2.600s 0:23.71 11.0%     0+0k 0+0io 126pf+0w

146833408 / 23.71 = 6192889.4 byte/s, so I read at about 6MB/s.

My smb.conf includes this line:
    socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
(not sure why that is in there or if it does any good ...)


2.5 contains changes that make it more fair with multiple users. I have
also been playing with readahead support and merging adjacent read request
into larger ones. I don't have any numbers for that yet.

/Urban