Samba + XP -> very slow

[Dr. Peer-Joachim Koch]

Hi,

I have installed the current HP binary package (based on
samba 2.2.5) on our HP file server.
We have the problem that all XP clients (not W2k or NT 4)
need endless time to open a share or map a network drive. Has somebody some hints ?
All other windows versions are working well.

Bye, Peer

[Chris Vail]

We'll need more data: over what kind of network, 10, 100, or 1000baseT? What hardware is on either end? How much time does ping show?

I'm not particularly surprised about your experience with XP. Its one of the reasons why we're using Win2k.


Chris

[Dr. Peer-Joachim Koch]

Hi,

soory - yes , i did not include
a lot of info's.
So we are running a L-class with
2*360MHz, 1GB RAM, 2FC-HBA, 1GBit-Lan and samba 2.2.5 under
HPUX 11.0.
It's only working as a file server (NFS,SAMBA).
Network is switched (Alcatel),
most clients are attached over 100MBit, the computeserver over gigabit (NFS).
Ping shows only 0. under hpux.
We have sometimes disk and network bottlenecks, but that has nothing to do with this problem. Even when the load is 0.0 this problem appears.

Bye, Peer

[Chris Vail]

Your L class isn't blindingly fast, but you shouldn't be having this much problem with it. Can you map a PC running something other than XP to it? Does it get the same result? I've mapped both Win2k and Win98 to my home system, across a 10base100 connection, and was happy with the results.

I'll ask our M$ geeks to see if they have any ideas.......but they hate XP about as much as we Unix geeks do.



Chris

[Dr. Peer-Joachim Koch]

Hi,

I was able to fix the problem trying a hint from the samba group. Under XP a service is installed called webclient.
It has no function, just slowing down network shares.

You wrote that the L-class is not the fastest one. What system would be a good update ?
The L-class has 2*360Mhz and 1GB RAM, would our 4 CPU N-class with 4GB RAM be significant faster ?
Or take a new machine ?
We do not have much money to spend ...

Bye, Peer

[Steven E. Protter]

Either machine has more than enough horsepower to do samba shares.

Its just filesharing, its not CPU or memory intensive.

I have file shares on L class boxes with 2 G of RAM and D class boxes with 1G. Whenever I run into issues, its traced back to Microsoft.

I'm not surprised by your XP experience, except I'm, using XP on this workstation, Dell Dimension 8200 500 MB RAM ... with no problems sharing files on a Linux box. The Linux box is a 1.1 G Pentium and your UX boxes should be able to run circles around it.

XP is a hungry child, does your client have enough memory?

SEP

[Dr. Peer-Joachim Koch]

Hi,

thanks for the answer. Well, it's esay to show the effect. With the running webclient it takes 20-40sec. to open a share.
Disable the services -> 1sec.

I was asking for the file server, because we are running ONE fileserver for the whole institute (~200 pc under win and linux). The l-class is attached to a san-structure and i see some warnings (disk bootleneck, network bottleneck) all over the day. I don't know, if a faster machine would be faster.
Bye the way we have to EMC Clarrion 4700 attached to the l-class with ~5TB disk space.

Any ideas how to check which part is responsible for thje bottleneck ?

Bye, Peer

[Adam J Markiewicz]

I don't know if this can be your case, but I expirianced a strange M$ behaviour in networking.

Somone has chosen 10.0.0.0 addresses for our network (class A). The network was not that big, so the netmask was 255.255.255.0. However file sharing and some other network activities were hell slow. After changing the network to 192.168.3.0 (class C) (with the same netmask) everything started working more like expected.

I just guess that M$ keeps scanning the network on the basis of the network class (ignoring the netmask). This is the only explanation I could develop. But who knows what kind of devil really sits under Windows?

Mayby it won't help you, but I decided to share it with you.

Good luck
Adam

[Chris Vail]

Regarding your questions later in the thread about overall speed.
As a rule, an N class is faster than an L class if it is properly configured. The N class has split backplanes (0 & 1) where the L class has the single back end. The N class can go up to 8 processors, the L can go to 4. You can put up to 550Mhz processors in either--though on the L class, this is trickier/more expensive. If you have a choice, put your Clariion on the N, add faster processors and memory, and split your fiber channel cards onto
both of the N class back ends. This will dramatically increase throughput. We use N class machines with 8x550Mhz processors and 16GB RAM for our Data Archive, and Data Warehouse servers, and they're well matched to the 1.6TB of data they have on the EMC Symmetrix 8830's. These days, upgrades to 440Mhz processors are CHEAP, and the upgrades to 550Mhz processors is coming down dramatically. If you need a good reseller, I can recommend mine--just post back here.
Also, we had the Clariions here for a while, but they were horribly misconfigured, and basically couldn't handle the load we expected of them. I wrote a power point presentation describing this for senior management, which I've here attached.

Chris