[mythtv-users] OT: SMB performance?

[Ben Kamen]

On 2012-01-19 12:03 PM, Matt Emmott wrote:
>
> Now, I'm a Windows Systems Admin by trade. I suck at all things Unix,
> plain and simple. When going through the NFS setup and speaking with
> friends who are smarter than me, they all suggested I just share
> everything over SMB. However, I did some testing last night, and the
> fastest transfers I can get to/from my Windows boxes and my two Myth
> BEs is 30MB/second. All testing was done with a 14GB MKV. The Myth
> servers are running XFS, and the Windows servers are NTFS with an
> 8192k allocation unit size. While this may be adequate for my needs,
> I don't feel comfortable just accepting that I'm going to lose 60% of
> my transfer speed potential. As I mentioned, my MBE is a vm (Please
> don't hurt me), but my SBE is physical and both are displaying about
> the same transfer rate. Neither of them are running the latest
> version of Ubuntu... I believe they are both on 10.10.

You can expand logical volumes on Linux transparent to clients too.

In fact, I've been able to do that on Unix (AIX LVM was Awesome) as far back as the early/mid 90's while Windows was still stuck in DOS mode and NT3.51 was still an unwanted child at MS.

But in the long haul, my experience with MS vs Standards has always been that MS (and they have it named as this exact policy) like to "embrace and extend" (adminspeak: adopt and break)... so it wouldn't surprise me if newer versions of Windows have something in them to foil Samba which back in the 90s was a WAY better replacement to Windows as far as client support over multi-segmented TCPIP subnets.

> So, after this wall of text, my questions are: Is this slowness
> expected due to the Linux implementation of SMB? Or is there
> something horribly wrong with my setup? Should I attempt NFS again,
> or are there ways to tune SMB to make it faster? Do newer versions of
> Ubuntu play more nicely with SMB?

FWIW, as a benchmark, I have a pure CentOS system running w/Gb networking and my "pushing of files" lately shows that I get about 500Mb/s from my Windows AMD Quadcore system back and forth to my Linux AMD quadcore. (both are ASUS MB's of different models but with RealTek Gb NIC's).

I didn't do anything special except enable jumbo frames on my Windows system -- which has had interesting results on other windows computers I have with Intel Gb NIC's...

So networking quirks can also have a lot to do with performance in the weirdest ways. -- in my world, I check EVERYTHING.

  -Ben