Eureka! Slow Samba transfers resolved!

[Jean-Marie White]

I just spent so much time troubleshooting why *some types* of samba transfers were slow that I thought I would share how I resolved the problem.
This problem had been going on for ever. As far as I could tell, it was only happening with winamp (MP3 player). All my MP3s reside on my Linux box and I was trying to access them from my PC running Windows 2000. What was throwing me for a loop was that Windows Media player seemed to be more successful at playing them ! What would happen is that Winamp would freeze and nothing would happen. I had then decided to just copy my MP3s back to my PC.


Then, last night I started using FrontPage for some reason or another, and when I tried to publish my web site to my Linux box, then behavior I had observed with my MP3s started plaguing FrontPage as well.

I went through all the troubleshooting guides, learned about every samba configuration options: I was able to successfully transfer a 100M file in either direction (linux->pc or pc->linux) using the File Explorer without any problem. But I just couldn't for the life of me understand why winamp and FrontPage were having problems.

Then I decided to use ethereal and try and understand what was actually happening on the wire. I realized that when winamp or FrontPage were trying to transfer files, Linux was ending up retransmitting the same frame over and over without ever receiving a TCP acknowledgment for it. Then the PC would eventually tear down the session and re-establish the session and restart the transfer. An article that I read (http://www.dd.iij4u.or.jp/~okuyamak/Documents/tuning.english.html) was talking about how Windows could mysteriously drop packets, and I started thinking that maybe packets were being lost due to some hardware problem.

So I looked at my PC network card configuration (Linksys LNE 100TX Fast Ethernet) and saw that the "Connection Type" was set to auto-detect. (My PC is connected to my Linux box through a Linksys 8-port Workgroup Switch - Ehterfast 10/100) So I thought, maybe having to ends that "auto-detect" each others speed is not good. So I changed my "Connection Type" to 100 TX Full Duplex and VOILA! All my problems solved, winamp is happily playing away and FrontPage can publish my whole web site in seconds.

I hope this will help.