Slow network speeds between Linux RAID box and Windows PC

Slow network speeds between Linux RAID box and Windows PC

[Dylan Distasio]

I apologize that this question is not directly related to mdadm, but I
thought some of the list might have experience in a mixed
Linux/Windows environment.  I am running a mdadm RAID5 file server on
a Ubuntu 8.04 Linux box on a gigabit LAN.  I am using a Highpoint 2680
card at PCI-E 4x as the controller (I have also tried the motherboard
SATA connectors directly).  I am running SAMBA on this box to share my
RAID5 with my main Windows PC running Windows 7 64 bit (although I
have gotten similar results with Vista also).
My question is related to what I consider slow speeds when reading
from or writing to the array from my Windows box.  I get anywhere from
20-30MB/s in either direction when transferring a single large file (3
GB as an example).  I haven't done detailed benchmarking on the array,
but spotchecks of file transfers from another drive on the same linux
box are giving me speeds above 100MB/s for reads and writes.
Does anyone have any suggestions for improving my speeds across the
network?  I don't know if SAMBA is causing some kind of bottleneck or
if Windows is not playing nice or if it's something with my network
configuration, but I was hoping to get alot closer to saturating the
gigabit connection.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Re: Slow network speeds between Linux RAID box and Windows PC

[Majed B.]

If you run: ethtool ethx (x is your ethernet's port number)
What does the Speed line say? 100Mbps or 1000Mbps?

I experienced some weird slowness from Vista only (Didn't have Win7
but I'd expect it to behave similarly), but never from XP. After some
search at that time, turns out it was Vista's fault, but Samba had a
workaround, which unfortunately I can't remember.

Try booting into Windows XP, or a Linux LiveCD on your other machine
and see if you still get slowness in transfers.

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 6:22 AM, Dylan Distasio <interzone@gmail.com> wrote:
> I apologize that this question is not directly related to mdadm, but I
> thought some of the list might have experience in a mixed
> Linux/Windows environment.  I am running a mdadm RAID5 file server on
> a Ubuntu 8.04 Linux box on a gigabit LAN.  I am using a Highpoint 2680
> card at PCI-E 4x as the controller (I have also tried the motherboard
> SATA connectors directly).  I am running SAMBA on this box to share my
> RAID5 with my main Windows PC running Windows 7 64 bit (although I
> have gotten similar results with Vista also).
> My question is related to what I consider slow speeds when reading
> from or writing to the array from my Windows box.  I get anywhere from
> 20-30MB/s in either direction when transferring a single large file (3
> GB as an example).  I haven't done detailed benchmarking on the array,
> but spotchecks of file transfers from another drive on the same linux
> box are giving me speeds above 100MB/s for reads and writes.
> Does anyone have any suggestions for improving my speeds across the
> network?  I don't know if SAMBA is causing some kind of bottleneck or
> if Windows is not playing nice or if it's something with my network
> configuration, but I was hoping to get alot closer to saturating the
> gigabit connection.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>



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       Majed B.
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Re: Slow network speeds between Linux RAID box and Windows PC

[Thomas Fjellstrom]

On Tue September 29 2009, you wrote:
> I apologize that this question is not directly related to mdadm, but I
> thought some of the list might have experience in a mixed
> Linux/Windows environment.  I am running a mdadm RAID5 file server on
> a Ubuntu 8.04 Linux box on a gigabit LAN.  I am using a Highpoint 2680
> card at PCI-E 4x as the controller (I have also tried the motherboard
> SATA connectors directly).  I am running SAMBA on this box to share my
> RAID5 with my main Windows PC running Windows 7 64 bit (although I
> have gotten similar results with Vista also).
> My question is related to what I consider slow speeds when reading
> from or writing to the array from my Windows box.  I get anywhere from
> 20-30MB/s in either direction when transferring a single large file (3
> GB as an example).  I haven't done detailed benchmarking on the array,
> but spotchecks of file transfers from another drive on the same linux
> box are giving me speeds above 100MB/s for reads and writes.
> Does anyone have any suggestions for improving my speeds across the
> network?  I don't know if SAMBA is causing some kind of bottleneck or
> if Windows is not playing nice or if it's something with my network
> configuration, but I was hoping to get alot closer to saturating the
> gigabit connection.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I had rather sucky GbE stats till I tweaked a bunch of linux network settings. 
Things like the default buffer sizes and what not. Boosted the quite low 
30MB/s I was getting to over 90MB/s. Look up some guides to tweak each os's 
network settings, and you should beable to speed things up.

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@shaw.ca

Re: Slow network speeds between Linux RAID box and Windows PC

[Eric Ramsey]

> I had rather sucky GbE stats till I tweaked a bunch of linux network settings.
> Things like the default buffer sizes and what not. Boosted the quite low
> 30MB/s I was getting to over 90MB/s. Look up some guides to tweak each os's
> network settings, and you should beable to speed things up.
>
> --
> Thomas Fjellstrom
> tfjellstrom@shaw.ca

Also,
Due to the design of the cifs protocol you will only see a max of
60MB/s a second or so for individual transfers. if you do multiple
files at once you should be able to max out around 90MB/s