smb performance

[wellanna]

Hi,

I use an application which generates static HTML pages for a family history website. The application has its own configuration file, but it also opens the family history database file(s), and copies hundreds of image files during a "website creation".

I was intending to store ALL of the data on Bubba, but performance is so bad, that is simply not feasible. I have tried moving the different data elements around, ending up with them ALL on local disk, to see how the performance varied. With ALL data on Bubba, it took 21 minutes to generate the website. With ALL data on local disk it took 140 seconds. I wasn't expecting such a difference.

If either the image files and/or the website output are located on Bubba, the time taken is significantly higher than a purely local scenario. I observed the smbd process consuming between 70 and 95% cpu in these scenarios, while memory, although high, wasn't causing Bubba to swap.

There are over 900 image files, the biggest being 200 KB, totalling 57.5 MB - not what I would consider large. There are about 1800 generated HTML pages, totalling 16.5 MB.

Is there anything I can do in order to speed up the SMB performance of Bubba, be it config of Samba itself, or the kernel perhaps?

Regards, Neal.

[Cheeseboy]

Hi all,

As SMB is quite slow and NFS works a treat between my linux boxes I tried to install Microsoft's Services For Unix (SFU) 3.5 on my XP laptop today. It is supposed to have support for NFS, and I thought it might be faster, and possibly a solution for wellanna. It requires some mappings for authentication, which I thought I had set up without problems.

Windows explorer now has a nice NFS folder under "Entire Network", but when I try to add my bubba by IP address I get challenged for uid/pwd. Whatever I type in I can't get access. Looking at /var/log/auth.log I see that the windows box does not even attempt to authenticate on bubba.

Any windows experts out there who can explain what is needed?

Cheers

/N