Very Slow Samba Shares

[GnuFlip]

I get consistently slow performance when I'm copying files to/from my Dockstar. I've tried to change things around and stay updated but it stays at about just over 1MB/s. Is this normal?
I thought it might be the NTFS driver so I installed ntfs-3g over ntfsprogs. No improvement.
My other thoughts are:
*Maybe it's mounting the drives with USB 1.1 instead of 2.0.
*Maybe that's just how fast 802.11g will go (plugging my laptop into ethernet gets it up to ~2.5MB/s)
*SAMBA has heavy overhead

I often copy files upwards of a few GBs and waiting an hour or two for each one is a pain. Does anyone have any idea what could be slowing it down so much?

[falker]

Try running top/htop and see if some process uses too much cpu. And perhaps try another filesystem, at least as a test, maybe ntfs-3g is not working correctly.

[netter]

all I can confirm is that my max speed on wired is around 7MB/s from a ntfs mounted drive. ntfs-3g made no difference at least to me. However for the life of me 7MB/s is the max speed. Also i'm not running Arch Linux ARM but ubuntu from tonido.com

[GnuFlip]

I'm currently transferring a file to the main filesystem on the dockstar which is ext3. It's still going at 1.3MBps and smbd is using about 8-10% of the CPU. No other processes are consistently using more than 1% of the CPU.

Since samba is only using ~10%, is it safe to say that it is not the bottleneck?

[GnuFlip]

I have three drives plugged in, the main 640gb drive is partitioned so I have a 5gb root (I know this is excessive for Arch Linux ARM install) and the rest mounted at /mnt/tumbler. Then I have two ntfs drives mounted in the /mnt/ dir as well and they are both auto mounted through rules I've added to udev.

Not that it should make a difference, but I just realized that my previous post was slightly incorrect - I was copying a file to the ext2 partition, not ext3. I forgot that I only changed the boot partition to ext3, not the extended part.

My fstab and mtab files are here: http://www.pastie.org/1366018
My udev rules file is here: http://www.pastie.org/1366035

[GnuFlip]

Bump... Are there any more ideas as to why samba file transfers are so slow?

[netter]

can you benchmark speeds on the drives one by one? also in your fstab can you do "auto" for each mount and see if that helps

[GnuFlip]

Sorry, I don't know how to get the transfer speed from the command line. The numbers I've supplied above are from the file copy GUI. Which tool should I use to benchmark the speed?

[phdeez]

What kind of transfer speeds do you get if you plug the drive directly into your computer via USB? I had a similar problem, and it was a setting with a particular enclosure- I needed to set my HD from Master to Auto (obviously I'm talking about a PATA drive).

If I'm copying large files across my network I normally see ~25MB/s (200megabit via a 1Gig switch) from a PATA drive. I think I've seen it top out @ 28MB/s a few times.

If it's smaller files (<100megs) I see ~13-18MB/s.

Also note- I have separate drives for OS/data. I'm using a usb stick for the OS drive. Just thinking out loud... but maybe having the OS & data from different partitions on the same physical drive is causing slowdowns? What happens with another drive entirely?

[GnuFlip]

If I plug the drive directly into my laptop then I get about 25MBps which seems normal for USB2. But when the same drive is shared over the network via my dockstar, I can only copy files to/from it at about 2MBps (and lately it's been going at less than 1MBps).

I have a few drives plugged into the dockstar and the storage drive is completely separate from the OS drive. I do have two partitions on the OS drive but I don't use either for main storage.