samba - Oct 2007 - Very slow performance on reads, Samba 3.0.24

Hello.

I'm experiencing slow performance when clients read from a share on
Samba 3.0.24. My clients are mostly Windows XP, 2k and maybe Vista.

I've eliminated all possible bottlenecks. The filesystem doesnt' slow
me down, nor the lvm'ed disks, as you can see here:

(I used pipemeter & cat - poorman's tools - to test. If you'd prefer
anything else please advise on what I should use)

root@fileserver:/data/Jocuri/BioShock-FLT# cat flt-bio.iso | pipemeter >
a.test
  20.24M/s  537.11M    8.00k   0:00:26

root@fileserver:/data/Jocuri/BioShock-FLT# cat flt-bio.iso |
pipemeter
> /dev/null
  31.62M/s  308.61M    8.00k   0:00:10

root@fileserver:/data/Jocuri/BioShock-FLT# cat /dev/zero | pipemeter > a.test
  64.01M/s  247.32M    8.00k   0:00:04

On FTP I get much bigger speeds:

yafc ibm86@SERVER_IP:/data> put file.test
/root/file.test
 97.8% [######################## ] 544.11MiB/556.18MiB ETA 0:01 12.96MiB/s

yafc ibm86@SERVER_IP:/data> get file.test
/data/file.test
 42.3% [##########               ] 235.18MiB/556.18MiB ETA 0:12 26.13MiB/s

(This is locally on the server...)

And now... I mounted the samba share locally on the server and I was
very surprised to see this:

The share is mounted as: //SERVER_IP/private on /mnt type cifs (rw,mand)

root@fileserver:/mnt# cat /dev/zero | pipemeter > a.test
  29.77M/s  982.27M    8.00k   0:00:33

root@fileserver:/mnt/Jocuri/BioShock-FLT# cat flt-bio.iso |
pipemeter
> /dev/null
 384.00k/s    4.47M    8.00k   0:00:12

root@fileserver:/mnt/Jocuri/BioShock-FLT# cat flt-bio.iso | pipemeter >
a.test
 384.00k/s   13.61M    8.00k   0:00:05


If I do both Read & Write I have a SMALL burst of 10MB/sec for about 1
second, then it drops back to 300k/s. Then after 30 seconds it
increases at 5MB/sec... increasing slowly to 10 or more.

I can't figure this thing out and it's really eating my nerves... I
wanted to upgrade everything to gigabit so I could get an improvement
but this doesn't seem to be the case. (I thought that the NIC was the
bottleneck, but with a FTP client I maxed out th 100Mbps NIC).

Also I mention that I'm running on Ubuntu-Server 7.04, with the
"stock" packages that ubuntu provides under a 2.6.20 kernel. The
machine running samba has an AMD Athlon running at 1400Mhz, 256kb
cache and 512MB RAM.

I'm also posting my config:

[global]
        workgroup = Neptun
        netbios name = FileServer
        server string = n-zone's server
        time server = yes
        client lanman auth = no
        #enhanced browsing = yes
        hostname lookups = yes
        idmap gid = 10000-20000
        idmap uid = 10000-20000
        lanman auth = no
        lm announce = no
        security = share
        password level = 8
        socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=8192 SO_RCVBUF=8192
        load printers = no
        os level = 50
        wins support = yes
        preload = share
        default service = share
        read only = no
        force create mode = 0755
        force directory mode = 0755
        guest only = yes
        guest ok = yes
        preserve case = yes
        hosts deny = ALL
        hosts allow = 86.107.189.0/24 127.0.0.1 192.168.10.0/24
192.168.1.0/24 192.168.9.0/24
        domain master = yes
        preferred master = yes
        local master = yes
        name resolve order = wins
        log level = 0
        syslog = 0
[share]
        comment = Data
        path = /data
        read only = yes

If you need more details please ask.

-- 
Bogdan Ilisei
0748 88 16 58