Samba Speed Help Needed

garyc

garyc

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A question for the networking experts among you.

I am having a speed discrepancy on the client side of a Samba service. Measuring the transfer speed from a server to this client by timing the download of a large file, Ubuntu 12.04 received the file at a speed of 5.5 MiB/s. Dual booting to Win7 on the same machine gives a speed of 8.5 MiB/s. The Win 7 connection is not as stable and can drop after a while.

Can anyone give any pointers on how to speed up the Ubuntu connection to similar speeds to Windows, or is this lower speed the price one must pay for stability? I know that Samba set-ups can be complex, but being a novice at this maybe someone can point out something obvious I am missing.

In case it is of relevance the client side machine in question has the following network hardware configuration:

NIC: Intel 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Speed: 1000 Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Auto-negotation: on
NIC is connected by cable to a D-Link DAP-1360 wireless access point running in 11n mode.

The server side of things is a HP N36L running Ubuntu 10.04.
 
garyc said:
A question for the networking experts among you.

I am having a speed discrepancy on the client side of a Samba service. Measuring the transfer speed from a server to this client by timing the download of a large file, Ubuntu 12.04 received the file at a speed of 5.5 MiB/s. Dual booting to Win7 on the same machine gives a speed of 8.5 MiB/s. The Win 7 connection is not as stable and can drop after a while.

Can anyone give any pointers on how to speed up the Ubuntu connection to similar speeds to Windows, or is this lower speed the price one must pay for stability? I know that Samba set-ups can be complex, but being a novice at this maybe someone can point out something obvious I am missing.

In case it is of relevance the client side machine in question has the following network hardware configuration:

NIC: Intel 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Speed: 1000 Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Auto-negotation: on
NIC is connected by cable to a D-Link DAP-1360 wireless access point running in 11n mode.

The server side of things is a HP N36L running Ubuntu 10.04.
Click to expand...

Is this over wireless? Because those speeds are extremely low for a wired gigabit connection (even for a wired 100mbps network). In that case it could just be badly written wifi drivers - make sure the system is up to date.

It could also just be that the linux smb client is not as efficiently written as the native windows machines' is.

Basically I don't think you are going to get more speed out of the linux box. You could make sure you are running the latest versions of everything on the machine which may help in some cases.

If you really want to get full potential out of network copies between the two linux boxes rather use nfs for this purpose. This however will mean you must either run both nfs and smb shares to cater for the windows and linux clients, or not enable smb if you don't need access on the windows box.

EDIT: Obviously it would make a huge difference if you used a wired connection (if possible).
 
Yes, this is over wireless. The DAP-1360 on the computer connects to a D-Link DSL-2760U modem router by 11n.

My next question was going to be if I should switch to NFS, as you suggested. There is a need to also accommodate Windows. Will running NFS and Samba at the same time cause any problems?
 
Okay well my first advice would be to ditch the wireless if at possible. The speed benefits and stability really do outweigh the nuisance of cables. I get around 40-50MB/s over the most basic gigabit hardware.

If however this is completely not an option than I say give nfs a bash and see if it improves anything, I don't see any issues running both smb and nfs as they use different ports. It is however a hassle to set all this stuff up and I would ask is it really worth is for that little extra?
 
go with NFS. More stable and faster. Setup NFS server and mount shares manually. Encryption adds overhead so if you dont need it just keep auth.

But like Zoidberg said... jam in a CAT5 and you will actually be able to stream HD.
 
Are there free NFS clients for Windows?

When I used it on my network years ago I could not find any free/open source NFS Windows clients (this was around 2004).
 
MyWorld said:
Are there free NFS clients for Windows?
Click to expand...

Windows 7 (which version) or XP?

Apparently some versions (Ultimate and Enterprise?) of Win7 have NFS support but it's not installed by default and you have to enable it somewhere in the control panel. You might also require http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2391 or http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=274 if you don't have ultimate/enterprise but I'm not sure if that will work.

http://code.google.com/p/nekodrive/
http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/windows/readme.html
http://blog.gambliser.com/2012/08/how-to-mount-linux-nfs-drive-on-windows-7/
 
Last edited:
This may be a bit OT, but I had a problem getting NFS to access anything in the host's /media directory. I spent ages trying to resolve the problem, which seemed to be related to permissions. I eventually gave up and went to smb which gave me no such problems.
 
Thanks for all the unputs. Unfortunately CAT5 is not really an option at the moment, although it is very tempting to just lay cables along the floor.

Looks like a lot of support for NFS. I have no practical experience in this so guess what I will be trying this Sunday. At worst I will have learned something.
 
garyc said:
Yes, this is over wireless. The DAP-1360 on the computer connects to a D-Link DSL-2760U modem router by 11n.
Click to expand...
Quite a waste having gigabit network cards and not using that speed ?
 
Just some feedback...

Tried the various suggestions and links on improving the samba speed but it remained the same no matter what the settings. Also tried it on some other distros: Ubuntu 10.04, RH 6.2 and F17, but no luck.

Tried NFS and the speed went up to 8 MiB/s. Not earth shattering but a 45% increase that was welcome. Also of note was how stable this was on large file transfers.
 
garyc said:
Tried NFS and the speed went up to 8 MiB/s. Not earth shattering but a 45% increase that was welcome. Also of note was how stable this was on large file transfers.
Click to expand...

To be expected of NFS. It had been tried and tested over many years, and used in many production environments.

What does your interface config look like (ethtool eth0/wlan0)? Everything on full-duplex and 100/1000Mb/s?
 
The interface on the client side is running full duplex at 1000 Mb/s. This is wired to a DAP-1360 wireless access point. From there it goes by 11n (unfortunately) set to WPA2/AES on to the router. The router is wired to the server where the NIC is set to full duplex and 100 Mb/s (auto-negotiate with the router).

I am still a novice with networking and after some tinkering this was the best setup I could arrive at within the limitations of using wireless.
 
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