poor Win client performace with Samba

I'm trying to figure out how to speed up my slow Win98 clients on my
network.

I run a small LAN with Samba 2.2.7 on a RH 7.1 running as a PDC. The
clients are a mix of 2000 and 98SE. The network runs well as a whole and
the W2K clients can copy and transfer data as fast as my Linux clients
running NFS - about 60Mb/s. But my three 98SE clients lag quite a bit
behind that. It's a good day if they get over about 9Mb/s. So I'm
figuring I've got problems on the clients or Samba. I've got Samba pretty
well tuned (I think) but I'm afraid I'm far from an expert with Windows so
there's likely plenty of room for improvement there.

Any ideas on how to get my 98 clients moving a little faster? Or where to
look for advice? Thanks!

Marc Williams wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out how to speed up my slow Win98 clients on my
> network.
>
> I run a small LAN with Samba 2.2.7 on a RH 7.1 running as a PDC. The
> clients are a mix of 2000 and 98SE. The network runs well as a whole and
> the W2K clients can copy and transfer data as fast as my Linux clients
> running NFS - about 60Mb/s. But my three 98SE clients lag quite a bit
> behind that. It's a good day if they get over about 9Mb/s. So I'm
> figuring I've got problems on the clients or Samba. I've got Samba pretty
> well tuned (I think) but I'm afraid I'm far from an expert with Windows so
> there's likely plenty of room for improvement there.
>
> Any ideas on how to get my 98 clients moving a little faster? Or where to
> look for advice? Thanks!

Hi there,

I had to do a similar thing over the weekend, and when before I knew
that I didn't like Win too well, by now I sure hate it...

Anyways, the settings that You are looking for should be available
in the "Advanced" tab of the NIC properties dialog of Your network
system settings. "Auto" worked for the clients that I've just set
up.

But if You say that there's Win98 involved, it may be that those boxes
are rather old and since uncapable of 100M by hardware.

Having just finished what You're doing here, my thoughts really are
with You...


Cheers, Jack.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
My personal reading of the string "MicroSoft" expands to "NanoWeak"...

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 10:22:24 +0100, jack wrote:

> Marc Williams wrote:
>>
>> Any ideas on how to get my 98 clients moving a little faster? Or where to
>> look for advice? Thanks!
>
>
> Anyways, the settings that You are looking for should be available
> in the "Advanced" tab of the NIC properties dialog of Your network
> system settings. "Auto" worked for the clients that I've just set
> up.
>
> But if You say that there's Win98 involved, it may be that those boxes
> are rather old and since uncapable of 100M by hardware.
>
> Having just finished what You're doing here, my thoughts really are
> with You...

Thanks. But it wasn't a rate mismatch.

I did get 2 of my 3 Win 98 clients up to speed by tweaking some Samba
settings. It seems that the SO_SNDBUF parameter is fairly important for
throughput tuning. I did a fair amount of reading and research and this
parameter needs to be tuned to the mss of the network. I determined that
my network mss, or at least the mss of the individual Win 98 machines, is
a fairly common 1460. Since it was suggested that the SO_SNDBUF parameter
should be a multiple of the mss, I made my SO_SNDBUF 2960. After that,
two of three Win 98 machines finally started having throughput
approaching that of my other machines - at least 35-40 Mb/s.

However, I have one more Win 98 machine left that is still stuck at about
8 Mb/s and no amount of tweaking and prodding has made any improvement.
It's an old IBM 760XL laptop and I just can't seem to get anywhere with
it. I ran a couple of tcpdumps from the good machines to compare with the
same from the laptop. I can see that the laptop isn't sending anywhere
near the amount of acks back to the server that the others are, resulting
in retransmits. But I'm afraid that I simply don't know what to do
anymore with this stubborn guy. I am going to try a different PCMCIA NIC
just in case there's something funny with the current one. But other than
that, I think that the laptop will just have to live with slower networks
speeds. Oh well...