[Samba] SaMBa raises 10x the traffic but only when _executing_,

Customer is running a Delphi app talking to an MS-SQL-Server through
Microsoft ADO. The SQL stuff is reasonably chatty but not a problem.

Whenever the program is run or a significant feature is used, it
generates much SMB traffic -- roughly 10x as much from a SaMBa (3.1 or
3.0) server as from a W2k or w2k3 server. As you might imagine, this
makes the app run very slowly.

This happens with one user or with many. The ?mbd processes aren't
raising a sweat, a few % of CPU at most. Samba delivers (and accepts)
data at up 9.8MB/s sustained to smbclient over a 100Mb/s link, and
delivers 2MB images to XP in an eyeblink, so it's not a fundamental
networking failure. There is no perceptible speed difference serving
from a muscly hardware-RAIDed-SCSI dual-CPU gig-of-RAM server or my
el-crappo AOpen laptop.

This DID NOT HAPPEN with their old Novell file server using Novell's
networking protocols. The application provider also has another site
running the app on a Citrix server but from a separate file server,
with no speed problems. That makes it look very much like a cacheing or
similar issue. The amount of SMB traffic involved is roughly 4x the
size of the application.

I've tried with and without oplocks, with different levels of buffering,
different OS levels, all sorts of config performance tweaks and they
make no perceptible difference vs minimalist changes OOtB.

It's interesting that despite delivering only 10%-ish as much traffic,
responsiveness from the w2k3 server is only about 20% better than from
any Samba server. The app is blindingly fast in comparison if run from
the local disk, but the customer doesn't want to have to maintain
40-odd local copies of the app, and the basic problem would still lurk.

Initially, we tested with a version of the app which was compressed
(12MB => 4MB) with BlinkInc's Shrinker, but later testing involved an
uncompressed version. That did run perceptibly faster, but it was an
incremental improvement, not the revolution that we need.

There is a an Ethereal capture up at http://samba.cyberknights.com.au/
if you're interested in seeing for yourself. This is taken from an XP
workstation (*.158) talking to a 2k3 server (*.4) and them my laptop
running Samba (*.108). The traffic to *.100 is the SQL server and
everything else is pretty much irrelevant.

The capture shows the workstation starting the app, making an initial
query, then doing a find on a product number, then closing down. This
is done first to the 2k3 server then Samba.

Trimming the requests down from ~50MB to ~5MB would probably make the
app "fast enough" but there's extra brownie points (and a meal at your
local Sizzlers or near equivalent, maybe a couple of pizzas) for enough
clues to make it all run like a greased otter. (-:

Cheers; Leon

--
http://cyberknights.com.au/ Modern tools; traditional dedication
http://plug.linux.org.au/ Member, Perth Linux User Group
http://slpwa.asn.au/ Member, Linux Professionals WA
http://osia.net.au/ Member, Open Source Industry Australia
http://linux.org.au/ Member, Linux Australia
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