Slow smb access to xserve

K

kengee

Registered
Hi folks,

I have an odd problem with downloads from XP and 2000 clients to an Xserve 10.3.9 serving both Mac OS X and Windows clients. The Mac clients have no throughput issues, but all windows clients have very slow donwloads, but normal/fast upload throughput. The Xserve is not an AD controller, simply set up as a stand only SMB server. The windows computers are listed and all have accounts. They have no problem browsing to the server, mapping drives, etc. - all very fast. Just downloading files (or opening - same difference). Thanks in advance for any help.

Ken
 
You mentioned mapping drives...

Have you tried mapping the drives to the client machines and having them try the file transfer again? I've found mapping the drive has sometimes yielded faster SMB data transfer between Windows clients and OS X Server.

Michael
 
Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply. I am currently mapping the drives on the client PC's. I have read in other groups and sites that most commonly people experience issues (mostly in older verisons of OS X server) browsing the network, geting folder lists, etc. This problem is only the download throughput. Mapping drives, browsing the network are speedy. I have tested throughput from these client PC's to 2 other PC servers and they have no issues with throughput, nor did they when I had a Windows 2000 server handling file sharing for the entire network. So it does not appear to be a duplex/ethernet configuration or a switch problem. I hae an upgrade to for 10.4 on the Xserve and I am thinking about applying that if I cannot resolve this soon.

Ken
 
You can tweak the rwin and swin settings using SMB.conf. This can, depending on the switches and network config, yield faster file transfers. See below. However, please recognize that SMB is generally slower than other protocols for pure file transfer. No amount of tweaking can fix that.

Modify smb.conf as follows -

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_SNDBUF=16384 SO_RCVBUF=65536

The TCP_NODELAY, etc does some of what the Broadband optimizer patch
does. The second two increase the send and receive buffers for smb
from the default value of 8172. Since they are per process values
I'd increase them incrementally until you see acceptable performance
and then stop.

kengee said:
Hi Michael,

Thanks for your reply. I am currently mapping the drives on the client PC's. I have read in other groups and sites that most commonly people experience issues (mostly in older verisons of OS X server) browsing the network, geting folder lists, etc. This problem is only the download throughput. Mapping drives, browsing the network are speedy. I have tested throughput from these client PC's to 2 other PC servers and they have no issues with throughput, nor did they when I had a Windows 2000 server handling file sharing for the entire network. So it does not appear to be a duplex/ethernet configuration or a switch problem. I hae an upgrade to for 10.4 on the Xserve and I am thinking about applying that if I cannot resolve this soon.

Ken
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