Chapter 39. Samba Performance Tuning

Paul Cochrane

Dundee Limb Fitting Centre

<paulc@dth.scot.nhs.uk>

Jelmer R. Vernooij

The Samba Team

<jelmer@samba.org>

John H. Terpstra

Samba Team

<jht@samba.org>

Table of Contents

Comparisons
Socket options
Read size
Max xmit
Log level
Read raw
Write raw
Slow Logins
Client tuning
Samba performance problem due changing kernel
Corrupt tdb Files

Comparisons

The Samba server uses TCP to talk to the client. Thus if you are trying to see if it performs well you should really compare it to programs that use the same protocol. The most readily available @@ -9,7 +8,7 @@ SMB server. If you want to test against something like a NT or WfWg server then you will have to disable all but TCP on either the client or server. Otherwise you may well be using a totally different protocol -(such as Netbeui) and comparisons may not be valid. +(such as NetBEUI) and comparisons may not be valid.

Generally you should find that Samba performs similarly to ftp at raw transfer speed. It should perform quite a bit faster than NFS, @@ -21,7 +20,7 @@ suspect the biggest factor is not Samba vs some other system but the hardware and drivers used on the various systems. Given similar hardware Samba should certainly be competitive in speed with other systems. -

Socket options

There are a number of socket options that can greatly affect the performance of a TCP based server like Samba.

@@ -40,7 +39,7 @@ biggest single difference for most networks. Many people report that adding socket options = TCP_NODELAY doubles the read performance of a Samba drive. The best explanation I have seen for this is that the Microsoft TCP/IP stack is slow in sending tcp ACKs. -

Read size

The option read size affects the overlap of disk reads/writes with network reads/writes. If the amount of data being transferred in several of the SMB commands (currently SMBwrite, SMBwriteX and @@ -57,7 +56,7 @@ The default value is 16384, but very little experimentation has been done yet to determine the optimal value, and it is likely that the best value will vary greatly between systems anyway. A value over 65536 is pointless and will cause you to allocate memory unnecessarily. -

Max xmit

At startup the client and server negotiate a maximum transmit size, which limits the size of nearly all SMB commands. You can set the maximum size that Samba will negotiate using the max xmit = option @@ -71,12 +70,12 @@ clients may perform better with a smaller transmit unit. Trying values of less than 2048 is likely to cause severe problems.

In most cases the default is the best option. -

Log level

If you set the log level (also known as debug level) higher than 2 then you may suffer a large drop in performance. This is because the server flushes the log file after each operation, which can be very expensive. -

Read raw

The read raw operation is designed to be an optimised, low-latency file read operation. A server may choose to not support it, however. and Samba makes support for read raw optional, with it @@ -89,7 +88,7 @@ read operations. So you might like to try read raw = no and see what happens on your network. It might lower, raise or not affect your performance. Only testing can really tell. -

Write raw

The write raw operation is designed to be an optimised, low-latency file write operation. A server may choose to not support it, however. and Samba makes support for write raw optional, with it @@ -97,48 +96,45 @@ being enabled by default.

Some machines may find write raw slower than normal write, in which case you may wish to change this option. -

Slow Logins

Slow logins are almost always due to the password checking time. Using the lowest practical password level will improve things. -

LDAP

-LDAP can be vastly improved by using the -ldap trust ids parameter. -

Client tuning

Often a speed problem can be traced to the client. The client (for example Windows for Workgroups) can often be tuned for better TCP performance. Check the sections on the various clients in Samba and Other Clients. -

Samba performance problem due changing kernel

Hi everyone. I am running Gentoo on my server and samba 2.2.8a. Recently I changed kernel version from linux-2.4.19-gentoo-r10 to linux-2.4.20-wolk4.0s. And now I have performance issue with samba. Ok -many of you will probably say that move to vanilla sources...well I ried +many of you will probably say that move to vanilla sources...well I tried it too and it didn't work. I have 100mb LAN and two computers (linux + Windows2000). Linux server shares directory with DivX files, client (windows2000) plays them via LAN. Before when I was running 2.4.19 kernel everything was fine, but now movies freezes and stops...I tried moving -files between server and Windows and it's trerribly slow. +files between server and Windows and it's terribly slow.

Grab mii-tool and check the duplex settings on the NIC. My guess is that it is a link layer issue, not an application layer problem. Also run ifconfig and verify that the framing error, collisions, etc... look normal for ethernet. -

Corrupt tdb Files

-Well today it happend, our first major problem using samba. +

Corrupt tdb Files

+Well today it happened, Our first major problem using samba. Our samba PDC server has been hosting 3 TB of data to our 500+ users [Windows NT/XP] for the last 3 years using samba, no problem. But today all shares went SLOW; very slow. Also the main smbd kept spawning new processes so we had 1600+ running smbd's (normally we avg. 250). -It crashed the SUN E3500 cluster twice. After alot of searching I -decided to rm /var/locks/*.tbl. Happy again. +It crashed the SUN E3500 cluster twice. After a lot of searching I +decided to rm /var/locks/*.tdb. Happy again.

-Q1) Is there any method of keeping the *.tbl files in top condition or +Q1) Is there any method of keeping the *.tdb files in top condition or how to early detect corruption?

-A1) Yes, run tdbbackup each time after stoping nmbd and before starting nmbd. +A1) Yes, run tdbbackup each time after stopping nmbd and before starting nmbd.

Q2) What I also would like to mention is that the service latency seems -alot lower then before the locks cleanup, any ideas on keeping it top notch? +a lot lower then before the locks cleanup, any ideas on keeping it top notch?

-A2) Yes! Samba answer as for Q1! +A2) Yes! Same answer as for Q1!

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