Hello,

I have installed a linux server, centos gui server with Raid1, his role will be only a file server. I installed samba and configured it. The file system is EXT3. the server got 4 gigs of memory.
There is a program in windows that writes files to the share.

I searched and i found that there is some commands that you add and they boost the performance. This is what i added to smb.conf

refresh = 1
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY
read raw = No
write raw = Yes
max xmit = 131072
use sendfile = Yes
dead time = 15
getwd cache = Yes
otlocks = No
strict allocate = yes



I got complains that the writes are not fast enough. Before me another IT guy configured the file server and it was faster, what he told my customer that he changed some command of cache but i dont know exactly what he did. I have been asked to find how to boost the performance.

Please give me more commands to try to boost the performance of Samba or tell me if i need to change anything..

Thanks A Lot.

Hi,

First you should Exactly define what your target is. There are dozens of reasons why performance is not as expected. Also you should define what "slow performance" means. Samba by itself is not the fastest protocol available.

It seems you did not consult man page or samba homepage.

First you should aware that there is no "run fast from now" option for all cases. You can play with size of send and receive buffers, both are fully explained on samba homepage. Take a look at Samba Performance Tuning Site.

Do not change more than one parameter at a time. Implement a perfomance measurement system which you use between all changes to find out if one option helps or not.

this is the results i got

[root@lm2000 ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1900 MB in 2.00 seconds = 950.94 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 156 MB in 3.03 seconds = 51.52 MB/sec
[root@lm2000 ~]# hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep -i speed
* SATA-I signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* SATA-II signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)