smbclient much faster then smbmount/ nautilus/ dolphin ???

mkonline · 12-15-2009, 03:27 PM

Hi,
I have a sambaserver running opensuse 11.2 and a gigabit network. Downloading files with smbclient is twice as fast than using nautilus or dolphin smbmount (smbfs) (66MByte/s against 30MB/s). I tried with a ubuntu 9.10 and opensuse 11.2 client. Same with upload (30 against 20). When I use instead an Ubuntu server - the same :-(
Generally performance with Samba is unsatisfying. With FTP I get + 100MB/s in both directions. I do not use Jumbo packets (switch can not handle those).

Any idea?
thanx

irishbitte · 12-15-2009, 03:48 PM

Think about how smbclient works, and how nautilus and other file managers work. smbclient mounts an SMB share somewhere in the local directory. Nautilus, et. al., use a virtual filesystem (GVFS and FUSE), and 'mount' the samba share there. This is the main difficulty, and does pose some slowdown issues. For most everyday apps, this is not a problem, but you are in a vey particular position. I would suggest using smbclient in a script to do the heavy lifting, and nautilus only for browsing.

Take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GVFS

mkonline · 12-15-2009, 04:20 PM

Hi,
thanks for that answer, so I already got a hint.

Quote:

smbclient mounts an SMB share somewhere in the local directory

when I use smbclient it opens a ftp like console and does not mount - I would be happy if it would mount. When I use smbmount the performance drops.