Hello Everyone, I have a few users that are complaining about the "slowness" of copying files to and saving files directly to the Samba server. From my own recollections, the speed is rather identical to the speed we experienced on our old Windows NT 4.0 fileserver. One thing that could be the impetus of this issue is that Samba is serving up files, for opening and copying from the server to a local workstation, nearly instantly (in most cases). I have looked at some Samba performance increase settings and haven't had much luck with those, on my test server. I have played with the SO_RCVBUF and SO_SNDBUF with limited success. I have also played with the MTU settings and that did nothing but decrease client to server write performance. The server is running the fastest IDE hard drives that I could purchase at the time. (7200 rpm) The server itself is Red Hat 7.2 running with Ext3FS. Without spending money, are there any other methods through which I can dramatically increase the network write performance? Regards, Robert Adkins II IT Manager/Buyer Impel Industries, Inc. 586-254-5800
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Robert Adkins II wrote:> Hello Everyone, > > I have a few users that are complaining about the "slowness" of > copying files to and saving files directly to the Samba server. From my > own recollections, the speed is rather identical to the speed we > experienced on our old Windows NT 4.0 fileserver. > > One thing that could be the impetus of this issue is that Samba > is serving up files, for opening and copying from the server to a local > workstation, nearly instantly (in most cases). > > I have looked at some Samba performance increase settings and > haven't had much luck with those, on my test server. I have played with > the SO_RCVBUF and SO_SNDBUF with limited success. I have also played > with the MTU settings and that did nothing but decrease client to server > write performance. > > The server is running the fastest IDE hard drives that I could > purchase at the time. (7200 rpm) The server itself is Red Hat 7.2 > running with Ext3FS. Without spending money, are there any other methods > through which I can dramatically increase the network write performance?You should compare the file system I/O performance of ext2, ext3, rieserfs, xfs and jfs - and you could be in for a BIG surprise! - John T. -- John H Terpstra Email: jht@samba.org
Just a thought, but I would check for errors on your NIC with ifconfig. Read times might still be quite good whilst write times are shot if there are network errors I have found. Noel Without spending money, are there any other methods through which I can dramatically increase the network write performance? Regards, Robert Adkins II IT Manager/Buyer Impel Industries, Inc. 586-254-5800 -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
Or you could just switch the filesystems to ext2? I believe this is just a case of changing your mount options in fstab and I think this is what John was alluding to earlier - ext3 adds a lot of baggage to the ext2 structure which slows it down quite considerably. Reiser and XFS were designed from the bottom up so make the journalling less of a performance issue. I guess it depends if you want to lose the journalling to gain performance? HTH Cheers, Noel -----Original Message----- From: Robert Adkins II [mailto:radkins@impelind.com] Sent: 18 March 2003 15:15 To: Noel Kelly; samba@lists.samba.org Subject: RE: [Samba] Performance Increase Suggestions Noel, I had already checked the NIC and found VERY acceptable errors. In over 2GBs of data transferred since my last scheduled maintenance reboot, there has only been 3 errors and 1 overrun. Which to me, is negligible as far as errors go. I have a sinking suspicion, that I am none to happy about, that I will need to compile a kernel with ReiserFS support, move ALL the data off of the Samba share, rebuild that partition with ReiserFS, recreate all the file permissions and then copy all of the data back over. This will of course take a few weeks, as I will need to run plenty of tests on the "spare" server and I only have a few hours available each week to work up such changes. Well, so much for the "quick" and simple fix. Regards, Robert Adkins II IT Manager/Buyer Impel Industries, Inc. 586-254-5800 -----Original Message----- From: Noel Kelly [mailto:nkelly@citrusnetworks.net] Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 9:41 AM To: 'Robert Adkins II'; samba@lists.samba.org Subject: RE: [Samba] Performance Increase Suggestions Just a thought, but I would check for errors on your NIC with ifconfig. Read times might still be quite good whilst write times are shot if there are network errors I have found. Noel Without spending money, are there any other methods through which I can dramatically increase the network write performance? Regards, Robert Adkins II IT Manager/Buyer Impel Industries, Inc. 586-254-5800 -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
Thanks for the suggestion Leroy, I probably should have added that when I built this server, I built it in "overkill" mode. It has much more RAM then is needed for our current load. The server has over 800 Megs of physical RAM dedicated to buffer and cache. Regards, Robert Adkins II IT Manager/Buyer Impel Industries, Inc. 586-254-5800 -----Original Message----- From: samba-bounces+radkins=impelind.com@lists.samba.org [mailto:samba-bounces+radkins=impelind.com@lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of Leroy van Logchem Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 10:12 AM To: samba@lists.samba.org Subject: RE: [Samba] Performance Increase Suggestions> This will of course take a few weeks, as I will need to run > plenty of tests on the "spare" server and I only have a few hours > available each week to work up such changes. > > Well, so much for the "quick" and simple fix.To optimize for writing to disk, see the docs on memory management. I had some gain delaying the writes, but do add some RAM. Some reading material: http://en.tldp.org/LDP/solrhe/Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edition-v1.3/ chap29sec287.html http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5840 Goodluck! Regards, Leroy -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba