Pathetic (SLOW) smbfs/cifs Performance and Good gvfs Performance: Some Findings

[dragon99]

It's not CIFS related, it's Nautilus.

m8, I share your pain. I have had the same poor performance with samba since 9.04, and FTP is only marginally faster. If its Nautilus causing the upset, why has this not been corrected by canonical in over 2 years? Seems like every time I look at the forum, nothing much has improved, still the same recurring problems. Why are there so many problems with both wireless & wired network? It doesnt encourage any new user (particularly an ex windows user) to stick with ubuntu.

Although I have enjoyed the ubuntu experience since feisty, this one issue is enough to make me look a little more seriously at mac as a replacement to win XP/Vista/win7. I've spent a lot of hours trying to resolve this issue, read a lot of threads, researched other ubuntu knowledgebases. I have re cabled all the cat5 on the home lan & pinned them exactly the same, spent many dollars replacing switches & other network equipment I thought was faulty. Nothing I have tried has corrected this problem.

The slow transfers are disgusting particularly between lucid and my FreeNas server. So slow in fact that I have been forced to use an XP laptop to transfer in excess of 2 TB data to the FreeNas. As a linux user, I really dont want to maintain an XP laptop, I would prefer a different linux distro on that laptop, but I'm not left with a choice.

If it is Nautilas causing the poor performance, would the use of a different file browser make any difference to the data transfer rates? Can Nautilas be disabled at startup & replaced with a different browser?

dragon

[smeuse]

I've been spending a lot of time on this issue and I've come to two conclusions:

1. mount.cifs is not performance optimized, and setting rsize manually doesn't seem to actually matter. /proc/mounts never shows an rsize over 16k, no matter what it's manually set to in /etc/fstab. I'm clueless on mount.cifs, I've got more reading to do, and i may try building from source to see if I can get it tweaked.

2. Nautilus is slowing down file transfers very dramatically.


Some data: my cifs mount looks like this:

//server/archive /home/user/smb cifs directio,credentials=/home/user/.smbcred 0 0

Transferring a 4G DVD iso:
Nautilus: 15.5MB/s
using DD read: 48.8MB/s

I also have NFS set up as well, here is what that mount looks like:

server:/archive /home/user/nfs nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr 0 0

Same file:
Nautilus: 86MB/s (not horrible)
using DD read: 105MB/s (840mb/s, what I would expect)


I just spent a few hours playing with my smb.conf file, and nothing seems to make that big of a difference either way. The biggest slowdown (3-4MB/s) was when I removed "use sendfile = yes".


The REAL pain point for me is that when I boot into my Win 7 partition on the same client PC, I get 100Mb/s file transfers, from the file browser, which tells me that the smb.conf is fine...

As a long time Linux defender (1993), this is serious pain

Windows is outperforming Ubuntu.....ugh...

I think It's worth focusing on mount.cifs for a little while.

-Steve

[SciFi-Bob]

I have some embedded devices all running samba, and on my gigabit network I get a network read/write performance of around 56-72Mb/s on most of them, running iperf, but max. 12-17Mb/s running samba (my test was some transfers of a 1Gb file).

It's a shame that the cifs client is not utilizing my network speed at all.

I cannot for my bare life understand how a file protocol can reduce network transfer speed so much. That's just has to be a bug somewhere..

And, yes, I HAVE read about anything related to read/write buffers on the Samba doc site, and tried them. Too bad that the socket option page link is down, but I have tried most of the combinations of those options too.

Is this a "Samba 4 is on the way, screw Samba 3" issue?
If so, I can't use it, my embedded devices cannot run samba 4, and my trial run of Samba 4 on a client only proved that it had major problems authenticating with anything older. (and had no speed increase)
I'm running server security on a pure Linux network. No Win machines here)

Is it too much to ask, just to have a file sharing system on Linux, like they have on Windows, with the same speed?

And, if any NFS freaks feel like promoting their favourite, I'll just have to say that it's not ready yet.
(Try to mount a user owned NFS share from a non-root client with target user read/write access, where all new files is owned by that specified user (and group))
Samba has all this, and more too! Please Samba folks - help us get the best file sharing system on Linux up and running in circles around Microsoft!

[Dimon8211]

Hi

Same is here. I affected by this prbm from 9.04. I always thought it is network related as I use wireless connection in general and had 2-3MB/s.After I updated my wireless to 802.11n I got only slight improvement in speed 3-4MB and 5-6Mb/s with mount in nautilus. Recently I tried Win7 as client and had 11-12MB/s on the same hardware, I installed NFS and its the same 11-12MB/s. But NFS is really pain to use because of small security and permissions issues. I saw many threads in Internet regarding mount.cifs module in different distros, but no solution. Don't want to use Win7 on my laptop, but don't have other option. Why Linux developers forget about perfomance and add only new features? I was really impressed with loading ubuntu 9.04 for 15-20 sec. Now it is became heavier and slower with every new version.

Best regards

[Enigmatic]

I recently upgraded my fileserver to Debian 6, and am seeing 80+ MB/s writes and reads (as it should be) via NFS. This is using an up to date 10.10 client.

[Dimon8211]

I recently upgraded my fileserver to Debian 6, and am seeing 80+ MB/s writes and reads (as it should be) via NFS. This is using an up to date 10.10 client.

Interesting situation. What had fileserver before Debian? I have Ubuntu 10.10 server, Win7 as client has good speed, Ubuntu 10.10 has not. So I suppose it is client related prbm not server

Best regards,

[Enigmatic]

Debian 5 (lenny?) previously. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but everything is very fast now.

[Dimon8211]

Debian 5 (lenny?) previously. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but everything is very fast now.

Think it is coincidence, I connected Win7 share and speed is bad again, so not server related.I alos tried wired connection (i has only 100M network) and get 7-8MB/s. Really terrible as I can get 11-12MB/s with this harware/drivers via NFS.
I sniffered packets and see that rsize never bigger then 5xxx bytes, while it is 64kB in Windows.

[bhobw]

This problem has been bugging me for a couple of days now.

I've read bug reports / blogs / alternative linux distro forums - it seems fairly common.

.... But I've solved my problem!!!


I was getting the following situation: transfer of large files to server would initially go fast then grind to a halt @ 1-5MB/s

I tried updating network card drivers - no joy.

I discovered that my problem was the way in which my storage drive was mounted on the server. I'd used the 'sync' option in fstab.

Removed this, remounted and .... 100MB/s - flying along now.

I suggest everyone checks their mount options

BHOBW

[schlatter]

Yes, I know this problem Today I started a new attempt at solving it and - as it seems - I succeeded. However, bhobw's solution didn't do it for me. Here's what I did:

1. unmount all cifs drives
2. rmmod cifs
3. modprobe cifs CIFSMaxBufSize=65536
4. mount cifs drives

Results (transfer rate measured by copying a large file):

CIFSMaxBufSize Rate (MB/s)
16384 (default) 17.9 MB/s
65536 35.9 MB/s
130048 (max) 36.9 MB/s

using gvfs 38.4 MB/s

While I can't match gvfs's speed, my cifs performance is now at least acceptable.