samba - Nov 2003 - Slow reads of large video files with a few clients connected

Hi.
I am configuring samba as a video server and was able to tune it up to the
point where it works great. Since existing configuration has Windows
Servers, I may always compare the performance.

There are two problems at the moment.

1. When I have four client writing (encoders) and one reading(player), my
reading client is getting data smoothly. It looks like my reading client
tries to cache data first and then play it back. It is not happenning when
I have 2 clients writing.
It would be relevant to say, that each client and server are on dedicated
network and each one has 100 full-duplex connection.

2. One of my clients is "Adobe Premiere" and I am loosing performance,
while reading file from Samba. It happens even when my server is dedicated
to this client only.

My configuration

--Intel 800Mhz
--1Gb of Ram
--Red Hat 8.0
--Samba 3.0 ( older version behaves even worse)

Have somebody faced similar issues or configured Samba for really large
reads and writes?

Thank you,

Gene

Hi, i had really big files on my samba up to 2 gigs and more , no problem
here
with samba 3, i also have a video server ,
in my samba files are stored from xawdecode with avi divx, and ffmpeg in
several
formats ( ffmpeg is really the best solution ,try it ).
After all smb network protokoll is as it is, but there is other thing which
might relate
which partition type do you use? i recommend ext3.
and there are many things which you have to know about mpeg, avi files which
related in their performance with different kind of players.
You can also get in problems with your network /....100 Mb maybe to slow
try 1000 Mb and if you have more clients reading and writing same files
( maybe there is a firewall involved ? )
Did set the right hdparm for you storage device? ( does  it use dma ? )
you should use raid 1 or stripped devices with a valid raid scsi or ide raid
controller devices
this will speed up read writing act on the storage.
So you see there a many thing involved in performance not even smb you have
to check
all this things to tune up
study perfomance features in smb.conf this may help too.
kill other deamons on the samba server which you might not need.
top will give you info about processes which are running.
After all i would use ffmpeg to catch my files from /dev/video direct to the
linux machine
there are good projects on the web which have a full working multimedia
solution on linux
mythtv freevo etc.
at last do you use latest kernel and samba versions?
My setup is based on knoppix a wintv card and it works like charme for
streaming storing
playing any kind of multimedia files.
Best Regards
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Samba Mail List Archive" <samba@sunice.org>
To: <samba@lists.samba.org>
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 6:48 PM
Subject: [Samba] Slow reads of large video files with a few clients
connected

> Hi.
> I am configuring samba as a video server and was able to tune it up to the
> point where it works great. Since existing configuration has Windows
> Servers, I may always compare the performance.
>
> There are two problems at the moment.
>
> 1. When I have four client writing (encoders) and one reading(player), my
> reading client is getting data smoothly. It looks like my reading client
> tries to cache data first and then play it back. It is not happenning when
> I have 2 clients writing.
> It would be relevant to say, that each client and server are on dedicated
> network and each one has 100 full-duplex connection.
>
> 2. One of my clients is "Adobe Premiere" and I am loosing
performance,
> while reading file from Samba. It happens even when my server is dedicated
> to this client only.
>
> My configuration
>
> --Intel 800Mhz
> --1Gb of Ram
> --Red Hat 8.0
> --Samba 3.0 ( older version behaves even worse)
>
> Have somebody faced similar issues or configured Samba for really large
> reads and writes?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Gene
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
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>