Amahi Forums

Greetings;
I am a bit puzzle about my slow local network speed, perhaps one or more of the veterans can share some light into improving it. My current topology is as follows:

Giga DLINk825--->GigaB Switch---->100MB Amahi Server (serving as dhcp). SPI is ON at the router.

Yes, unfortunately I am using VIsta in my Laptop where i am transacting all these file movements at the Amahi shares. My download speed from the network is 2.5MB/s, my amahi intrashare is 1.5MB/s. I don't understand why is my local network so slow? I did buy a HIRO GigaB ethernet (realtek 8169) for the Amahi server, but it freezes the server, so i am using the on-board ethernet at 100MB on the server. Other than getting rid of vista, which I have seen, any other suggestions on how to improve on the local speed?

I'm not sure how you mean intra-share file sharing
but let me guess
you're trying to copy data from 1 share to another
I've tried this here on my XP box (Gb LAN through Gb Switch, no firewall active) and a 100MB file will take around 5 seconds to copy (which I find slow, it should get at least around 80MB especially since everything is configured as full-duplex with jumbo frames enabled).
However if I copy a file from one folder to another directly on the hda it's done in around 0,5 seconds:
time cp zerofile ../backup/
real 0m0.385s
user 0m0.005s
sys 0m0.379s

note that this is with a file that's just 100MB of zero bytes. (created like this: "dd if=/dev/zero bs=4096 count=25000 of=zerofile" which gives me a 102MB file with a disk throughput of 175MB/s)
if I do this with a 100MB file filled with random bytes I get this locally:
time cp randfile ../backup/
real 0m0.693s
user 0m0.011s
sys 0m0.551s

so that's almost twice the time.
from XP the copy still takes around 5 seconds.

So why is that?
Now we know that network transfers on Vista are notoriously slow, but let's disregard that for now.
Windows will copy the file into its buffer and then copy it to the destination. So if your normal link utilisation is 2.5MB/s and you're copying a large file you will indeed get around 1.5MB/s transfer speed (2.5 divided by 2 plus a little extra apparently )

First of all: make sure you're connected through cables, not Wifi (which is a lot slower).
You might want to try it with your firewall disabled to see if that helps. You also may want to try updating your network card drivers, but I don't think it'll give you more than a few % boost (not the kind you're looking for at least).
Basically your max network speed (at 100Mb/s) is currently around 25% of the total capacity (that sucks).

I've tried Vista and I hate it - slow network transfers, network not working after system went in standby, whathaveyou. I installed a release candidate of Windows 7 and everything has been peachy ever since, I get full link utilisation! It's an onboard 100Mb/s NIC (laptop) and I get transfer rates between 9.8 and 10.2MB/s (which is completely saturating the link), the rest of the network equipment is Gb/s. The dual boot Linux install gets the same link utilisation.

perhaps this bug we're researching can help a bit? http://bugs.amahi.org/issues/show/342

changing some samba settings appears to yield a 3.7 times improvement!

can you guys try it out and see if it works for you?

actually everyone please try this out, as we would like to make it the default!

it involves removing these settings from the "socket options" line in /etc/samba/smb.conf:
which then becomes: NOTE: this will only work until the next re-generation of the conf file (which takes place any time a Setup -> Shares setting is changed).

I take it you'll have to tell the samba daemon to reload the config?

if so: should do the trick

I'll test as soon as I get home, but I've already changed the setting

meh

I see no real improvement in filetransfer speed.

Mind you, I'm running XP & Win7, not Vista.

really?? not much change??

wow. in my case is huge.

ps: i seem to recall that smb reloads automatically after a while if it sees a change in the conf file?

to be more positive: there is no slowdown at all, so I guess it's safe to set the parameter that way.
it felt a little wee bit quicker, but that's in the quarter/half second range.

still haven't had time to play with bonded interfaces, but I will do so hopefully soon... I'm curious what that will do for performance (though I think the cap is mostly disk I/O bound)

we committed a change for [url=http://bugs.amahi.org/issues/show/342]huge performance increase in samba-/url] now and we will release it in a little bit.