SAMBA operations are very slow

[[deXter]]

Hi all,

I have the ASUS RT-AC66U with the latest Merlin beta. My desktop has an ASUS AC66 PCIe adapter running Windows 8 x64 Enterprise Edition, with updated drivers and no major background tasks (no AV or firewall etc). I'm connected at full signal strength on 5Ghz and the speed varies between 450Mbps to 900 Mbps. I have a brand new 16GB SanDisk USB stick attached to the router, formatted with two ext3 partitions - properly aligned to MiB boundary.

I have noticed that SAMBA operations - in particular, browsing the share, checking the properties of a file, deleting files etc takes ages - around 5 minutes per operation. Even if I browse elsewhere on my local system and then press the Back button in explorer to go back to the SAMBA share, it again takes ages to load. For the actual file-transfer itself, I get around 5-6 MB/s.. which is on the slower end (realistically I would have expected at least 8-10 MB/s) but it's acceptable for my needs.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this issue? Is it just a matter of the router being under powered or could there be a config issue? I use SAMBA on other low-end embedded systems such as a Raspberry Pi and old Android devices, but it's never this slow.

 

[RMerlin]

Do you have anything else also generating IO to the USB disk at the same time (such as Download Master, or the DLNA server indexing its content)?

The max raw throughput the router can read from a USB disk is 25 MB/s. Once you add filesystem overhead and the CPU overhead from the server daemon (Samba), the max read speed you can get through SMB is around 15 MB/s. This is what I get here using a mechanical USB disk.

Performance might be lower with USB flash drives - many USB 2.0 drives will cap around 15-20 MB/s of raw throughput.

On a flash drive it's recommended to use ext2 instead of ext3 (or at least disable journalling). This will reduce the flash wear, and will also help a bit with performance.

I would test throughput over Ethernet as well to rule out any impact related to Wireless.

 

[[deXter]]

Thanks! Looks like the issue is with Windows 8. Still haven't managed to fix it, but browsing the shares in Linux seems to work just fine.

 

[janosek]

My Windows 7 x64 file shares are terribly slow as well. From what I have read, its a Windows issue. I quickly tried to set up an NFS share on my Windows box, but I would need to root my nexus 10 to mount it and I am too lazy for that.

Anyone have any luck with NFS?

 

[[deXter]]

My Windows 7 x64 file shares are terribly slow as well. From what I have read, its a Windows issue. I quickly tried to set up an NFS share on my Windows box, but I would need to root my nexus 10 to mount it and I am too lazy for that.

Anyone have any luck with NFS?

Thanks for the tip - NFS works great! Note that you'll need to be on Win 7 Professional or Ultimate (and for Win 8 you'll need to be on Enterprise or Server). But yeah, browsing the NFS share in Windows was super-fast. Transfer speed improved too, I'm getting 7-8MB/s to the flash drive.

Ironic how Windows has issues with SMB but not NFS. Just goes to show how crappy Microsoft's protocols are.

[Offtopic] Also, rooting the Nexus is easy - just a three step process really (if you do it on a Linux machine it's even simpler as you don't need the drivers)