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Comment by tosh | Hacker News Reader

10 pointstosh8 comments

I get wildly inconsistent SMB speeds at home even on a 1Gbps wired connection. Sometimes it’s 100MB/s, sometimes it’s only ~30MB/s. On WiFi it’s worse. No idea why.

I always get consistent speeds over SSH/SFTP, so that’s what I use when transferring large files.

Weird. I get consistent disk-saturating (or link-saturating, depending on which of my disks the data is coming from) transfer speeds.

FWIW, I'm running a custom-built Linux computer that does multiple duty as file server, router, and buildbox. I've been running Samba for ages and am currently running whatever's stable in the Gentoo Linux package tree.

This is similar to my setup and experience as well. I have a multi-purpose server running Samba with 10 Gbps SFP+. I have 2.5 GbE on my desktop and easily saturate that when transferring files.

I even use the network for stuff like old game ROMs and ISOs for emulation. The random access times are still magnitudes better than I’d be able to get with any HDD.

> I have a multi-purpose server running Samba with 10 Gbps SFP+.

Yeah, ditto. My desktop and switches along the path to the server/router also have 10gbit fiber connections.

Stupid question: Are you aware of the 10Gtek company? If you're unaware, my experience over the past many years is that they sell inexpensive SFP+ modules that work just fine... so if you're ever in the market for more modules, give them a try (if you haven't already).

I would guess it depends on your exact smb configuration, as I recall there were multiple configuration parameters for transfer speed, like

> socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072

I never benchmarked these though.

I haven't run a Samba instance that has changed those options from their defaults in like twenty years.

  # grep socket /etc/samba/smb.conf
  #

I don't have any performance-tweaking options set... just auth, share definitions and server identity and protocol information. I learned long ago that for SOHO (and probably even medium-size-office) use, the performance-tweaking defaults for well-tested software like this are just fine.

Is this the link you intended to post? All I see is a forum post with a request for troubleshooting assistance and some basic diagnostic questions from folks providing assistance. Am I missing something here?

I was asking myself the same question, looking for something noteworthy.

No there's nothing here to find. The way to go is in the linked discourse, god it's ugly, use iperf.

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