Hello,

We are running Samba 3.0.33 on a 2-node Linux cluster running RedHat 5.6 ES.  
Its primary application is to serve out a single network drive to support our 
business (out 350GB in size).  For several years, this solution has been 
running flawlessly.  File access was almost as fast as a local disk, so putting 
files on the server was never a problem.  Our clients are running mostly 
Windows XP Pro.  We have a few Windows 7 clients.

Almost a year ago, that changed.  Applications written in VB 6.0 that read 
files from the server started showing *significant* performance problems.  What 
used to take seconds now takes more than a minute to finish.  Moving the file 
to a local disk brought the speed back up to where it should be.  Moving the 
file to a Windows 2003 or 2008 server also provided good throughput.  All 
clients experience this same problem.

I ran "strace -f" against the smbd process that is assigned to my desktop and 
then ran the VB application to see what the daemon was up to.  I discovered 
that it went through a process of opening the file several times and reading 
data from it, using progressively smaller buffer sizes until is settled on 
using a buffer size of 1, which it used for the remainder of the file I/O 
session.

I've attached the smb.conf file for your reading pleasure.  I can attach the 
strace output file if that would be helpful.

I suspect that something changed on the Windows desktop side to bring this 
about, since we made no changes to our VB code at all.

Richard G. Lang
Sr. Software Engineer
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
(330) 659-3312

-- 
To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
instructions:  https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba

Reply via email to