Re: Samba Shared Folders over a WAN link

On 06/10/2004 02:53 PM, Scot L. Harris wrote:

On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 14:44, Ow Mun Heng wrote:

Guys,

	need some help.

       is there any way to get smb packets to speed up over a WAN link.

	Some way to prioritse the packets?

There's a 1MB link from US to a server in Asia. Currently using FTP/HTTP
conn will get like ~40-50KB/s transfer rate. However, using Samba, it's
really very slow.

Thanks for any response
--

What you are seeing is expected. That protocol has a lot more overhead
than straight TCP type apps. Not a whole lot you can do to resolve that
problem aside from throwing more bandwidth at it. And that may not
really fix it. The latency of the link you have may be part of the
problem. Have seen many dedicated private line and frame relay links
that are doing good to get 300ms response time between the U.S. and
Asia. It is even worse if your link goes via satellite.

You might try tunneling the traffic and compressing it but I doubt that
would give you the kind of improvement you are looking for.

Is your bandwidth maxing out, because of a lot of different kinds of traffic? Or does Samba go that slowly even when nothing else is taking up bandwidth?

Scot's probably right, that's the way it's going to be with Samba. But if it's not getting the whole pipe, then maybe you can speed it up with some kind of QOS/traffic shaping, maximizing the bandwidth that Samba gets while leaving some minimum for other protocols/ports. If Samba is slow even when it has the whole pipe to itself, then you could look at some kind of replication setup, for example with rsync. But probably either of my suggestions will cost you money/effort.