[mythtv-users] OT: SMB performance?

Gary Buhrmaster gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com
Fri Jan 20 15:33:29 UTC 2012


On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 06:00, Ian Clark <mrrooster at gmail.com> wrote:
....
> I get about 40MB/sec to/from my samba box to my win7 box, which I
> think is about the max my network supports (iftop watching a very
> simple client/server sending data across a socket seemed to indicate
> this speed too.)

iperf tends to be the tool of choice for measuring raw
network performance.  Most modern mainstream processors
(with reasonable ethernet cards :-) can get quite close
to line rates on a LAN with little additional work (WAN
high speed transfers are outside of scope here).  For
a gigabit network, you should see closer to 100MB/sec
(mid 90's at least).  However, iperf says nothing about
application or system bottlenecks.  All too many protocols
have a "request, (wait), receive, (acknowledge)" cycle which
leaves lots of wasted (idle) time.  And if a disk has to seek
to read data, that can slow down the effective transfer
speeds.  Parallel transfers can help in some cases, but
may have bad interactions in others (such as when that
causes the disk to seek from file A to file B every other
request; seeks kill performance).

Gary


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