Arch Linux

Avenger

Member

Registered: 2005-11-11

Posts: 65

Strange Samba performance

I'm having some issues with the transfer speed samba gives between two of my computers. Computer A is a Windows XP machine, and Computer B is running Arch. This are the results I'm getting (using bwm-ng on the arch-box to measure transfer speed):

A -> B When computer A is initiating the transfer with the normal windows copy: ~9.1MB/s
B -> A When computer A is initiating the transfer with the normal windows copy: ~8.8 MB/s

A -> B Using mounted cifs file system and cp: 4.8 MB/s
B -> A Using mounted cifs file system and cp: 4.5 MB/s

A -> B Using smb:// and copy in KDE: 4.7 MB/s
B -> A Using smb:// and copy in KDE: 5.9 MB/s

Now, the question I have is, why is the speed so much better when I start the copy-process from computer A (the Windows machine)?

I have set

socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

in my samba/smb.conf file.

These measurements might not be spot on, as bwm-ng only measures kb/s at that exact time, and the speed tend to jump up and down, but the speed I get when computer A initiates the file transfer is indeed allot higher.