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Date:      Tue, 23 Jul 2002 12:40:07 -0600
From:      Chad David <davidc@acns.ab.ca>
To:        Richard Sharpe <rsharpe@ns.aus.com>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, alfred@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: tuning for samba
Message-ID:  <20020723124007.A65741@colnta.acns.ab.ca>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0207111113340.4936-100000@ns.aus.com>; from rsharpe@ns.aus.com on Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 11:20:51AM %2B0930
References:  <20020710180711.A43342@colnta.acns.ab.ca> <Pine.LNX.4.33.0207111113340.4936-100000@ns.aus.com>

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On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 11:20:51AM +0930, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Chad David wrote:
> 
> > A local company has been having issues with samba for some time (it kills
> > an e250, and has seriously stressed an e5000) and I've been telling the
> > admin (half seriously) that he should just toss it on a PC with FreeBSD.
> > Well they finally got tired of hearing FreeBSD this and FreeBSD that and
> > asked me to bring a box in if I was so confident... tomorrow morning at
> > 9am.  So, I'm building a new box tonight and was wondering if anybody
> > has any tried and true tuning parameters for samba on -stable.  They
> > currently have ~700 users attached.  The load per user is pretty low
> > but just rebooting and handling the reconnects has killed small boxes.

As a follow up to my post a few weeks back...

The box is currently easily handling an average of 650 connections with
80% cpu free and lots of memory.  The only thing I had to change was
kern.ipc.nmbclusters=32768.

> 
> As others have said, memory is an issue.

Memory hasn't actually been a problem.  The vast majority is inactive, and
the scan rate is pretty close to 0.

> 
> In some 'benchmark' testing, I have noticed that FreeBSD holds up pretty 
> well to large numbers of connects coming in at one time, say compared to 
> Linux. Starting up 100 clients during about two or three seconds (as long 
> as it takes to fork 100 processes on the driver) does not kill a FreeBSD 
> Samba server as much as it does a Linux server running Linux 2.4.x.

All of the load is actually redirected through a firewall, and when we
changed the mapping from the e250 over to FreeBSD about 350 clients
connected all at once.  The cpu dropped to about 50% for 30 seconds and
then things settled down.  We did see 3 seg faults in smbd during the
initial rush, but have been unable to reproduce or to get a core file.

> > As a side note, the data being served will be attached to the samba server
> > via NFS.
> 
> Hmmm, some of the locking stuff might be an issue then ...

We haven't noticed any problems with samba that could be traced to NFS.
I have found that the NFS performance is actually worse for bulk copies
when nfsiod is running, so we just do not run it.


Thanks to everybody for their input.  Due to the success of our tests
FreeBSD will now be replacing Solaris 9 in this environment.

-- 
Chad David        davidc@acns.ab.ca
www.FreeBSD.org   davidc@freebsd.org
ACNS Inc.         Calgary, Alberta Canada

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