Samba performance advice

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 16:58, Stewart Williams wrote:

> I am looking for a bit of advice on performance issues serving files 
> with my FC4 samba server.
> 
> The specs of my server are: 2.8ghz cpu, 1gb mem, IDE udma 100 (raid 
> mirror), 100Mbit NIC & Network.
> 
> I am serving 4 users and and a few gigabytes of data, which includes:
> 
> A 300mb QuickBooks file (in constant use)
> 2 users' Outlook .pst file @ about 1gb each (in constant use)
> 2 users' Outlook Express files at about 1gb each (in constant use)
> Various files including some photoshop files @ around 40-50mb each
> 
> When all 4 users are working, the file access performance reduces 
> dramatically, and is very slow.
> 
> What I am asking for is a bit of advice as to whether I am try to serve 
> to much data from the one PC.

4 users?  Shouldn't even blink at that.  Scsi drives would be
better for multiuser use, but you'll get better bang for the
buck if you throw in enough RAM to hold most of the busy
files in cache.  Waiting for disk seeks to complete is the
slowest operation you can do, and each of those users wants
the disk head to be in a different place.

> Also is there anyway to monitor or find statistics of the amount of data 
> being served or the performance of the network card?

iostat and vmstat from the sysstat package.  sar for snapshots at
time intervals.  But first use ethtool to make sure your
NIC is running at full duplex and ifconfig to see that there
are no tx or rx errors. 

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com