SAMBA + ZFS ok for Windows clients only

boris_net · May 13, 2013

Hi all,

I have read a lot on tuning Samba shares on my FreeBSD system running ZFS. Everything is great since I can get 100 MB/s+ read from FreeBSD to a Windows client and 90 MB/s+ write from Windows to FreeBSD.

I was wondering if anybody would have any pointer at how to get an Apple client running MacOS X 10.8.x in this range of throughput.

I get only 60 MB/s from the Mac but can still get 80 MB/s+ from a Windows Client in a VM run on the same Mac, this same Mac is not capable of going higher than 60 MB/s to the same Samba share. I suspect the CIFS client on the Mac to be slow and was wondering if anybody would have some place where I can read to understand why this is the case.

I can iperf to 980 Mb/s from this Mac to my server.

Thanks in advance.

Sebulon · May 15, 2013

Hi @boris_net!

We also have a ZFS storage system that serves SAMBA, and from our performance testing, we could never get it to go anything higher than 25 MB/s read/write. This was using a 10.6.X client. The same tests with a Linux client shows 64 MB/s read and 48 MB/s write. A windows client gets 82 MB/s read and 64 MB/s write. Important when you test is to create and mount a ramdisk just to eliminate disk IO as a bottleneck. You said that a Windows VM inside of the Mac got a better score so that shouldn't be an issue in this case. I agree with you that it seems to be the Mac OS CIFS client that is the culprit.

/Sebulon

boris_net · Jun 26, 2013

Just wanted to follow up since I got my setup up and running now and got Netatalk and Howl and mDNSresponder for AFP share from my APPLE computers to my FreeBSD server and it rocks!

115[ ]MB/s sustained from two MAC clients to my server (server has 4 x 1GigEth in a LACP LAGG with MTU set at 9000). 115[ ]MB/s sustained from Windows clients as well.

Thanks.