samba - Mar 2009 - 1MB/s gigabit transfers on dell poweredge

Hi,

I have installed samba on a dell poweredge server. It uses integrated 
NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet card. My issue is that i am getting
extremely slow speeds (about 1.2MB/s) on the gigabit network from linux as
well as windows clients using when reading from the samba share.

On the same setup (same server, client, network) using scp,rsync,nfs gives
me anything between 35-50 MB/s. So I know the network is not an issue.

Even on my test setup at home equipped with 100mbps lan I get better
speeds (5-10 mbps)

I have done scores of samba installs over the past decade but this is the
first time I am doing it on a gigabit ethernet and was shocked with the
result.

I have also tried using a Intel etherexpress pro pci-express network card
on the server, just in case (even though other protocols seem to tranfer
fast) and no luck.

Is this an issue with samba and gigabit?
Any one using samba on gigabit and getting anything like 25-35 MB/s?
please let me know if there are any gigabit specific optimisations /
changes.

Godwin

> Any one using samba on gigabit and getting anything like 25-35 MB/s?
> please let me know if there are any gigabit specific optimisations /
> changes.
>
I get 50MB/s (on large files) from my 5 year old 2 processor 2GHz
opteron server at work to my 2.9GHz Athlon X2 desktop running windows
XP SP3. Both have 4GB of memory.

John

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Ian McDonald <iam@st-andrews.ac.uk>
wrote:
> John Drescher wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 1:30 PM, ?<godwin@acp-online.co.uk>
wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Volker,John, folks
>>>
>>> I upgraded the smb binaries to 3.0.24 and reduced the log level and
my
>>> samba servers now giving throughputs of 32-38 mbps with some spikes
>>> beyond
>>> 60mbps .
>>>
>>> That's way below what John's getting. Anyway, I can at
least finish off
>>> this installation as my samba server can match or exceed the
clients
>>> benchmark against his existing MS windows server.
>>>
>>> Since I am using 3 X 1 terabyte disks in a hardware raid 5 array
disk I/O
>>> should not be an issue. I expect the issue to be too may patch
points
>>> (the
>>> joy of structured cabling) or not too good switches.
>>>
>> I believe that actually is a problem. I mean you need more disks. 3
>> disk raid 5 is not a good setup for performance. ?I would say 5 is a
>> minimum.
>>
>> John
>
> Raid 5 is not a good setup for performance, full stop.
>
Its not good for database performance and random small writes but it
shines in large file operations. Either way a 3 disk raid5 (software
or hardware) should be able to generate 100MB/s sustained on linux so
this probably is not an issue.

John