Samba: slow network transfer
 

I setup samba to transfer a large amount of files and when it is running I noticed the speed is slow I was expecting just short of 100Mbps but ethstats reports around 45Mbps

total: 45.46 Mb/s In 1.81 Mb/s Out - 3925.5 p/s In 2617.6 p/s Out
eth0: 45.46 Mb/s In 1.81 Mb/s Out - 3925.5 p/s In 2617.6 p/s Out
sit0: 0.00 Mb/s In 0.00 Mb/s Out - 0.0 p/s In 0.0 p/s Out


This is not fast enough since I will regularly be transfering 100GB's+ the current transfer is 93GB's and looks like it is going to take 5 hours.

My Samba server is a AMD Athlon XP 2600 with 1 gig ram and the hard drive I am transfering to is a 7200rpm SATA (media only) the client is a Xbox 5400rpm hard drive with Linux installed and I am transfering system backups plus recordings from my TV card.

These 2 systems are the only things on my router.

If you are using 100 Mbps Ethernet then that's not an unreasonable figure - wired Ethernet tops out at about 40% of it's rated speed.

If you are doing Linux to Linux file transfer then Samba isn't the most efficient method. You can compress the data going over the wire with the -C option of SSH file transfer. it's also worth looking at rsync, which will transmit only the differences between two file sets over the SSH connection.

If that doesn't seem suitable, consider whether it's feasible to have the script that does the transfer compress the data into one or more bz2 archive files before sending it, and uncompress at the destination.

If samba is not the right choice I might as well go back to ftp since it gives me a speed of 90Mbps. I will just use samba for smaller stuff since I like mounting a share in Linux

My experience is that SMB is awful for really big file transfers.

I'm surprised that you can get 90% out of Ethernet, but I suppose that I work on heavily-used networks.

It's definitely worth trying SSH though, if only because it's probably already running on the server already... These days running an FTP service isn't worth the time, SSH or HTTP do everything that FTP ever did plus things FTP will never do (like good security).