Samba and Win XP Speed Issues
 

OK, surely someone has resolved the speed issues with Windows XP. My company sells a lot of Linux servers and Windows Client PCs. I've not tracked down if it's a recent service pack or security fix or some other *parth* from MS that causes this but it is quite annoying. Multiple recent servers and WinXP PCs with all patches applied to both have Samba performance that is nowhere near where it should be, or where it is on Win98 or Win2K client. It appears to be XP specific...

Stock RH9 with all errata/patches applied, RH 2.2.7 SAMBA. Running on good hardware (SuperMicro servers with Intel Gigabit onboard) and Dell client PCs.

I've researched a lot... SO_RCVBUF adjusted high and low. IPTOS LOWDELAY and various other similar changes. The WinXP "webclient" service is disabled, etc...

1 server and 2 WinXP PCs attached to a 100mbit switch. I shared a drive on one of the XP machines and have a writable share on the Lniux machine. Oh, SAMBA is being a PDC and both PCs are joined to it. Anyway, moving files to/from the server as compared to to/from the shared drive on one of the PCs result in MUCH worse speeds for SAMBA. Using smbclient to put a file from the server to a shared drive on an XP box compared to a DOS FTP get of the same file to the same PC differ by 10X in speed.

2 different servers and different client PCs as well. I've tried SAMBA3 as well. Got the rawhide rpms for 3.0 which do now support a new file-sharing method Microsoft has dreamed up that uses TCP port 445(?). No speed change at all. With SAMBA3 my PDC setup was kind of broke so I reverted back since the machines needed to go into production. The NAME$ machine accounts weren't being automatically created when joining a PC to the domain.. I've not read up on winbind enough yet and that'll probably be the fix for it.

But then... Any ideas or suggestions on speed? Surely there's a magic bullet out there somewhere? :-)

Thanks!

PS. Almost forgot. The QOS Packet Scheduler in XP had a lot to do with this but deleting it still doesn't resolve the speed problem fully. I deleted it and that sped things up to the point that the SAMBA server xfers at maybe twice as slow as XP<->XP now. Oh, and the QOS Packet Scheduler of course only affected speed from XP to SAMBA, left XP to XP alone. Figures...

I've seen the same problem on our network. I've heard Samba 3 fixes all this, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
I did notice that machines we upgraded to XP from 2k didn't suffer from the speed problem, though-hmmm...
(I don't run Win at home at all any more, and I'm a little over-cautious about changing our production systems at work...:))
BTW: I've been told there's a registry entry that persists for QOS, even if you delete it off the system. I'm not sure what it is, but I could probably dig it up...

On the XP machines.

regedit

Browse to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters

Create a new DWORD value called

SizRegBuf

with a dword value of 0000ffff

This will speed up all connections to the machine.

It is a fix for large directory access speeds.