Samba transfer speed

[glennzo]

So what kind of speed are you getting with Samba over your local network? What speeds should I be seeing? I'm currently transferring a large amount of files from one computer to another. I'm taking everything off of a desktop drive on computer A and putting it on an IDE disk on computer B. Transfers are running at around 600-700 KB/Sec. I've seen moments, mostly when the transfer starts, where speeds were at 1000KB/Sec, but that lasts a very short while and then starts to "degrade" until it reaches 600+ KB/Sec. It then seems to level off there. Is this acceptable? Is this all I can expect to get out of a 10/100 home network? The current transfer is 2.5GB. Looks like it will take 1 hour+ to complete. Transferred 12GB last night. Was looking at 4-5 hours to complete so I left it running while I was sleeping. Personally, I think this is slow. I think it could be exponentially faster.

While I'm running these transfers I'm looking at some documentation on Samba speed tweaks. I've been adding little tidbits here and there to both smb.conf files. Some of it seems to help. Sometimes there is a noticeable difference in speed. Sometimes the changes actually cause degradation in speed. If you have a speed tweak that you would like to share the information will be gratefully accepted. Samba gurus welcome to reply. How do you set up Samba in an office environment? How do you set Samba up in an environment where performance is critical?

Maybe I should forget about Samba and try using a different transfer protocol? Am I expecting too much from Samba?

I should stop before I really start to ramble. Anyhow, networking beats the heck out of the sneakernet, at any speed!

As a side note, or maybe quite importantly, there is a router and a network switch (not a hub) involved here. Maybe something to consider?

Current transfer shows 1.6GB of 2.5GB - 23 minutes left (665.7KB/Sec)

[beaker_]

No, I don't think you're rambling on because protocols like ftp are all about moving files so they're hard to beat. Mine are normally pdc with wins but I never sat down and clocked it however yours sounds more like the performance I see through my vpn rather than in the office. Maybe I should shove a 1 or 2G file through tobe sure I'm not hallucinating as it normally only sees 100MB - 500MB at any time. If you suspect or believe it's hardware related, then start with a simple cross over cable and work outward from there.

[bbfuller]

Hello glennzo

The way I read the numbers is:

Network 100Mb/s (megabits second)

divide by 8 to get MB:

Maximum speed possible 12.5MB/s (megabytes second)

On this network I've never seen anywhere near that though I did come across someone who reckoned to see a sustained 10MB/s using ntfs. I put the 2.5MB/s loss down to network overhead. Here I've always seen somewhere between 7 and 8MB/s as a sustained data transfer rate using Samba and that has been repeated over 5 or 6 years since I first got 100Mb/s networking gear. It's been consistent over a wide range of network cards and several different network switches.

Interestingly, although wireless should be capable of half the speed of my wired network, I've never seen greater than 2MB/s that way, unless I sit the laptop on top of the access point it's usually nearer 1.7MB/s.