Beside the story Greg Folkert wrote (witch make sense)
remember this about GB network carts:
You'll never get a full 1000 mb/s !
i saw you have a celeron processor (witch ain't the fastest in performance)
coz' gb nic's tent to use a lot processor overhead, also raid cards use
(a little) processor time.
hdd through put is an issue, all together makes the performance.
I've tested 2 marvel yukons (pci-x) between 2 xp clients, with only
memory transfers and got (after some windows tweaking, coz windows isn't
gb lan ready by default!!!!) 500mb/s (so that is only 50%)
and had 99% proc. load. (pentium M 1.8)
on realtek gb lan cards it was even worse.
so a big processor(s) and real fast hdd's might do you some good!
so put this together with Greg's story, and you'll get the fact's.
Cheers, and good luck with testing/tweaking
Collen.
Greg Folkert wrote:
On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 13:52 -0500, Rohit Kumar Mehta wrote:
I believe I have some hardware or configuration related performance
issues running samba 3.0.14a-3sarge.
Our server is an Intel Celeron 2 Ghz with 512 MB of RAM and a 3ware
card using SATA disks in a RAID 5 configuration (3ware controller card).
We have a gigabit network and are using Intel Gigabit ethernet cards
e1000).
When copying large files to the samba shares on the system, the transfer
rate maxes out near 100 mb/s. We tested with nttcp and were able to get
speeds of nearly 800mb/s. So I think it is safe to conclude this is not
a network issue.
Various tools like top, xosview and mpstat convinced us that we are
bound in the CPU. Stopping the samba file transfer and the cpu idle time
exceeds 90%. We are convinced that our CPU is the bottleneck,
but not sure why.
#cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.00GHz
stepping : 9
cpu MHz : 1996.920
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips : 3956.73
Does anyone have any advice on how to speed up our file transfers? We
regularly have to 18 GB worth of files to this system, and it would be
very good if we could speed it up. At current speeds, we get no
advantage at all from even having gigabit network cards!
Please feel free to ask me any other questions about our system setup.
Thanks in advance for any advice,
Have you done *ANY* system caching parameters, filesystem tuning, or
Samba Config tuning?
What have you done besides verify it is not the network itself?
Have you tested throughput for the 3ware card?
I can tell you this, if you have the RAID-5 setup not-optimally to work
with the block sizing on your Filesystem you'll never get excellent
throughput.
I always tend to use largest blocking factors with the 3ware cards for
RAID-5. This (for me at least) has proven the fastest and least latency
ridden settings for me. But then I am using XFS on all of my 3ware
RAID-5 setups.
For Mirroring, I typically let the defaults work. Defaults have been by
far the best setup for most filesystems. If you still believe you are
suffering from CPU overload, I'd suggest sending it to the RAID-5 array
with over compressed scp (with mild compression of 4 or 5) and then
without compression. See what you get.
I am betting the real problem comes from multiple bus-mastering cards
conflicting or colliding. The Intel-E1000 and the 3ware card are
definitely both bus-mastering.
There are a couple of things on the Samba side you can do. Turn off
Logging (you don't need it really), change the read and send buffer
sizes, change the TCP setting it uses to be more in line with Gigabit,
move to using Jumbo frames, get a TOE (TCP Offload Engine) NIC.
Then if you still have issues, turn on logging for the stuff you are
worried about (auth would be 0, etc...) and then add a sniffer to you
connection. You'll definitely find something. My gut reaction is that
since this is a Celeron Processor, you really need to goto 64-bit slots
on the mother board. Getting a PCI-X capable motherboard would greatly
help your problems.
One last thing, any of the 95xx cards from 3ware are 3.3V only and are
PCI2.3 compliant, they will function incorrectly possibly even be ruined
or not recognized by a 5V or Auto-detect 5v/3.3v slot. The 9xxx, 8xxx
and 7xxx cards can be used in either a 5V or 3.3V PCI slot.
Good luck.
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