samba - Jan 2006 - write cache size option: why deprecated? doubled my performance

Hello,

I had some troubles with samba performance after I switched my network 
to gigabit ethernet:
FTP gave 50MB/s (on a 5GB file)
NFSv3 40MB/s (win xp client with SFU, free nfs client for windows)
Samba (win XP client) only 15MB/s.

After some fiddling with options, I found out that setting write cache 
size to 256KB resulted in a very big performance improvement, now also 
samba gabe 40MB/s.

The documentation (man-page smb.conf) doesn't mention that this option 
is deprecated. But the log file now prints:
WARNING: The "write cache size" option is deprecated

Question: why is this option deprecated? is there an alternative?

regards,

Peter Mutsaers

On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 12:25:14AM +0100, Peter Mutsaers
wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I had some troubles with samba performance after I switched my network 
> to gigabit ethernet:
> FTP gave 50MB/s (on a 5GB file)
> NFSv3 40MB/s (win xp client with SFU, free nfs client for windows)
> Samba (win XP client) only 15MB/s.
> 
> After some fiddling with options, I found out that setting write cache 
> size to 256KB resulted in a very big performance improvement, now also 
> samba gabe 40MB/s.
> 
> The documentation (man-page smb.conf) doesn't mention that this option 
> is deprecated. But the log file now prints:
> WARNING: The "write cache size" option is deprecated
> 
> Question: why is this option deprecated? is there an alternative?
Well we were trying to get rid of it as it complicates the
write path quite a lot. The problem is it's very useful in some
filesystem cases, so we may end up changing the status from
deprecated back to normal.

Jerry or Volker, any thoughts ? I know Volker has found this
option useful in the past.

Jeremy.