Hi!
I'm working with Samba backed by a high performance filesystem. From a
Windows 2K and Windows XP client I'm trying to achieve very high speed
single file throughput over GigE from the Windows client using either
open/write or CreateFile/ReadFile APIs. I'd rather not venture into
overlapped IO there so that we don't have to recommend that all our
customers rewrite their applications!
I'm seeing a problem where it appears that windows is not reading data far
enough ahead (or maybe at all) to keep the pipeline full. From assessing
the load on samba, it is a apparent that much of its time is spent idle.
The characteristics of the load suggest that WinXP or Win2000 is not
requesting readahead far enough to be useful. My link roundtrip latency
is around .4 ms beyond the data transmission time, the samba servicing
time for 32K of data (32K is the blocksize I'm using) is about .27 ms, and
the wire time for 32K of data should be around .27ms on GigE.
I understand that it is necessary that oplocking be functional to have the
windows client read ahead. However, I have verified that oplocks are
being established, yet still the readahead seems either nonexistant or
minimal. I don't know how to establish which. FreeBSD is the host OS.
I have verified that samba is not sleeping on socket buffer space, and
this is borne out by the fact that changing TCP window sizes on client and
server improves performance very little.
I'd be grateful for answers to any of the following questions:
1. How do Windows clients determine appropriate levels of readahead?
Are there any caps on this algorithm that I might be hitting?
2. Is the client or server responsible for producing readahead data (I'm
assuming this is the client)?
3. Any other tips on how to make this work or anecdotal evidence of
single file performance in the half-gigabit ballpark in the read and
write of a single file?
4. Is there any way for samba to send unsolicited readahead data to the
Windows client when an oplock has been established?
5. Any samba tricks for debugging this?
In terms of registry keys I've already changed those for window sizes,
MTU, UseOpportunisticLocking, SizReqBuf (to 64K), EnablePMTUDiscovery,
MaxCmds.
Here's my samba configuration:
[global]
encrypt passwords = yes
log file = /var/log/samba.log
max log size = 100
local master = no
read size = 8192
# below socket sizes have been varied without effect
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=65536
SO_SNDBUF=65536
dns proxy = no
change notify timeout = 3000
disable spoolss = yes
smb passwd file = /usr/local/private/smbpasswd
password server = *
winbind uid = 10000-20000
winbind gid = 10000-20000
winbind enum users = yes
winbind enum groups = yes
workgroup = FOO
server string = A Samba Server
hosts allow =
security = SHARE
oplocks = true
[myfs]
printable = no
level2 oplocks = true
guest ok = yes
path = /myfs
comment = myfs
read only = no
hide dot files = no
share modes = no