Samba performance advice

Stewart Williams stewart_cw at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Nov 4 18:22:11 UTC 2005


Benjamin Franz wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Stewart Williams wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am looking for a bit of advice on performance issues serving files 
>> with my FC4 samba server.
>>
>> The specs of my server are: 2.8ghz cpu, 1gb mem, IDE udma 100 (raid 
>> mirror), 100Mbit NIC & Network.
>>
>> I am serving 4 users and and a few gigabytes of data, which includes:
>>
>> A 300mb QuickBooks file (in constant use)
>> 2 users' Outlook .pst file @ about 1gb each (in constant use)
>> 2 users' Outlook Express files at about 1gb each (in constant use)
>> Various files including some photoshop files @ around 40-50mb each
>>
>> When all 4 users are working, the file access performance reduces 
>> dramatically, and is very slow.
>
>
> The probable bottlenecks given your specs:
>
> 1) 100 mbit ethernet is probably too slow. A *saturated* 100 mbit 
> connection is only going to move 10-12 megabytes of data per second. 
> Go to gigabit.
>
> 2) Disk I/O. If you want to get performance from the disks, use RAID10 
> with at least 6 disks (and a couple of extra controller cards capable 
> of 133Mhz operation to get you down to 1 bus per physical drive or 
> alternatively a 3ware board). Or carve up multiple disks so that your 
> Quickbooks file is one physical disk array, your Outlook files are on 
> a different disk array and your 'various' files are on a third disk 
> array (again making sure you keep to the 'one drive, one bus' rule).
>
> 3) Disk cache. Add more memory. Try to get at least 2 Gigabytes of RAM 
> installed. It can help hide many sins of disk performance.
>
> 4) Make sure you have everyone connected via an ethernet *switch*, not 
> a *hub*.
>
>> What I am asking for is a bit of advice as to whether I am try to 
>> serve to much data from the one PC.
>
>
> You can probably handle that load - as long as you eliminate the 
> bottlenecks.
>
>> Also is there anyway to monitor or find statistics of the amount of 
>> data being served or the performance of the network card?
>
>
> sar -n DEV
>
Thanks for the advice Benjamin,

The network is running on a 10/100Mbit switch, with all NIC's running at 
100Mbps full duplex.

	
	
		
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