Fix for slow Samba performance on G3 Macs (10.3)

Mar 04, '05 07:45:00AM

Contributed by: jdash

For those running OS X 10.3 on legacy hardware, this tip might solve your Samba performance issues. The OS 10.3 install was a breeze (using XpostFacto 3.0 and an install of OS 9.1). The aim of putting this modern OS on such old hardware was to run a personal web, file, and printer server. I knew 10.3 client could handle these tasks easily. But I immediately ran into problems with Samba. Specifically, no matter what I tried, the write performance (to the Beige G3's hosted shares) was a terrible 100-300KB/s. sftp performance was pretty good, as was scp. But I wanted Samba!

Digging through the man smb.conf help pages, I came accross this option: large readwrite. The man page clearly stated that this was the default setting. However, a 64bit capable kernel/OS is needed! So I set large readwrite = no in the smb.conf file, restarted the deamon, and bingo!

I now am able to juice the Beige box from my XP and OS X clients. Performance is great:

Quite an improvement from the original 100KB to 300KB I was getting.

I have only tested it under a heavy load for a few days -- but it is doing great so far. BTW, I have my L2 cache enabled via Sonnet's utility, and I am _not_ using old NDRVs with on-board video (XpostFacto options).

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