[OpenIndiana-discuss] CIFS slow reads but fast writes

[Richard L. Hamilton]

On Apr 21, 2011, at 5:44 PM, Eric D. Mudama wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 21 at 13:53, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
>> Gary wrote:
>>> I can't speak to this issue in regards to OpenIndiana but CIFS/samba
>>> has historically been much slower than NFS, FTP, and even netatalk,
>>> etc. due to its large metadata overhead. One can observe this in the
>>> wild with a few well time tcpdumps. One thing that might be worth
>>> investigating in this situation, however, is a comparison of smbclient
>>> transfers to/from another Unix host vs. transfers to/from a Win7 host.
>> 
>> Yeah, I actually tested that.  smb on a centos5.5 box.  Almost identical results, which is why I am suspecting what you are.  I think for now, I'm just going to stick to using iSCSI....
> 
> Wierd.  My oi_148 installation (in-kernel CIFS server) reads large
> files at ~100MB/s to win7-64 clients over a gigabit network without
> trouble.

One might hope the in-kernel server would have some performance advantages,
or why bother?

Further, someone else says "metadata overhead", and you say "large files".
I'm thinking there's _less_ metadata overhead per unit data with large files
than if one was say copying, archiving, or extracting a bunch of small files.