Samba performance
 

I got samba all configured and running how I need, but I'm having a performance problem.

I'm getting about 7 megs a second sustained transfer rate on a large file (in either direction), but for many smaller files, it's a lot worse.

For example, I transferred starcraft and winamp5 from the SMB server to a winxp machine and that took about 1.75 times as long as to transfer them back later. What might be the cause of a series of small files to be slow, and what can I do about it? (I mainly am dealing with small files)

I've tried experimenting with values for SO_RCVBUF and SO_SNDBUF, among other things, but haven't come up with anything that works better.

Thanks in advance.

You can test reads and writes using normal FTP for example between both machines, and see if you have the same difference in speed.

if you have, then maybe it is a file system issue and not a samba one.

They say ReiserFS is good for small files and can enhance the performance of some applications that rely alot on them.

I wish I could solve your problem, but I can give more info. Performance on smaller files will always be MUCH slower than with larger files. If you do an FTP transfer, you'll notice a similar performance hit. You didn't post any tranfer speeds so it's hard to say if it's really an issue or normal.