Hello, I've been using samba to share folders for a number of years now. thankyou very much to the samba team.
Now I'm posed with some questions. I have a couple of servers hosting desktops for thinclient users. Until now I have been mounting /home with NFS on these servers. Recently we have upgraded the whole system and have run into write performance issues with the NFS server. time dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/testfile bs=16k count=16384 268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 45.0461 seconds, 6.0 MB/s This is much too slow for the gigabit network. We can improve this a lot by exporting /home with the async option (60-70MB/s), but the NFS documentation strongly recommends against using async (opposed to sync) because of possible firesystem corruption if the NFS server crashes. This is a cache issue. After numerous tests we have given up trying to get it working properly. And we've been trying CIFS. Everything works well and write speed is a lot better. time dd if=/dev/zero of=./testfile bs=16k count=16384 268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 3.6 seconds, 74.4 MB/s But I am worried about the cache that Samba makes use of. We would like samba to write to disk immediately. We've found these two options for smb.conf sync always = yes strict sync = yes I can't quiet see the difference between the two in my case. If I set 'sync always = yes' _or_ 'strict sync = yes', I can copy files at 70MB/s (similar to NFS using async). If I set both options, file transfer speed drops to about 20MB/s Does that mean that I do need to set both options to ensure the cache is written to disk before the server returns the ok to the client? How could I test this? And now while I'm here ;) , does anyone have any other recommendations for this kind of setup? Thanks, Chris. -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba