Samba connections throttled by windows XP?

BinaryBob · 12-05-2003, 03:31 PM

On my small home network I’m running a Samba 3.0.0 file server, to store some CD backups on. Obviously they are pretty large files, around 600MB on average. When I am sitting at a windows xp client, and start a transfer of one of the iso files to the samba server, the transfer is VERY slow. I opened up the “Windows Task Manager” and watched the networking tab for network use to gauge what was going on. The transfer starts out using approx. 60% of my 100Mbps network connection, but almost immediately appears to be throttled down to around 1%, often even lower. Only when working at the windows xp client, and transferring a file to the Samba server, does this happen, all other client combinations work quickly. I have tried all sorts of optimizations in the smb.conf file, to no avail. Other people seem to have encountered the same if not remarkably similar problem (after lots of Googling), I have even found posts on this forum regarding it, but I have found no solution. Below is my smb.conf file:

Code:

[global]
        workgroup = WORKGROUP
        server string =
        socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
        #map to guest = Bad User
        os level = 65
        preferred master = Yes
        hosts allow = 192.168.

[webroot]
        path = /www
        read only = No

[readonly]
        path = /shares/readonly
        guest only = Yes
        guest ok = Yes

[isos]
        path = /shares/isos
        valid users = isoman
        read only = No

Any help, or references would be appreciated, Thank you.

dubman · 12-05-2003, 03:41 PM

In almost any home network application the limiting factor is your hard drive read/write/access speed. If you are writing from an ATA100 IDE drive to another ATA100 IDE drive on the remote system, you will never reach your full available network bandwidth. This is a common problem and misconception about network traffic. You can only transfer what your hard drives can handle. If you really want to maximize your performance get yourself some RAIDed SATA 10000 RPM hard drives.

-hope this helps

BinaryBob · 12-05-2003, 03:49 PM

My hard drives are fast enough for just copying files around. If for instance I copy a large file from the Linux samba server to the windows client, the transfer speed is over 10x faster than if I copy from the windows client to the samba server. Hopefully that’s more clear. The hard drives, are same make/model.

Leeb · 12-12-2003, 07:38 PM

I notice an incredible performance hit after converting my file server from Windows 2k to Mandrake 9.2 w/Samba. Doing image backups from XP to the Samba share are much slower than XP to the old Win2k share.

The server disk is a Western Digital 120GB w/8MB cache, dedicated to files, no OS or anything else, so it is not the limiting factor. This same disk performed well doing backups when the server ran Win2k.

I don't really know my way around Linux or Samba, so if there are tweaks I should make please advise.