Poor Samba Performance Fixed

I have been having poor performance with Samba on my Gentoo-based file server for larger files (videos, 8 megapixel photos, etc). I tried everything, including performance tweaking but couldn’t get Samba to perform for these larger files. When I used scp to move the files across my Gigabit LAN, I’d see 10-20MBps transfer rates, so I knew it wasn’t the NIC driver, file system, or anything else other than Samba. After reading some similar posts by Ubuntu users from 2006 and early 2007, I decided to upgrade Samba from samba-3.0.24-r3 (the version that was current when I installed Gentoo on this new server about 4-5 months ago) to the latest. Wow, what a difference! Everything is working great now! According to the posts, there have been some performance issues with Samba but they weren’t announced or identified for a little while. The latest stable ebuild for Gentoo seemed to do the trick. FYI, I’m now on samba-3.0.27a and have the following USE flags: acl cups ipv6 pam python readline swat syslog

I have been having poor performance with Samba on my Gentoo-based file server for larger files (videos, 8 megapixel photos, etc). I tried everything, including performance tweaking but couldn’t get Samba to perform for these larger files. When I used scp to move the files across my Gigabit LAN, I’d see 10-20MBps transfer rates, so I knew it wasn’t the NIC driver, file system, or anything else other than Samba.

After reading some similar posts by Ubuntu users from 2006 and early 2007, I decided to upgrade Samba from samba-3.0.24-r3 (the version that was current when I installed Gentoo on this new server about 4-5 months ago) to the latest. Wow, what a difference! Everything is working great now! According to the posts, there have been some performance issues with Samba but they weren’t announced or identified for a little while. The latest stable ebuild for Gentoo seemed to do the trick.

FYI, I’m now on samba-3.0.27a and have the following USE flags: acl cups ipv6 pam python readline swat syslog

James Higginbotham

Founder of LaunchAny and author of Principles of Web API Design. James helps enterprises build API platforms and get them ready for AI.