I’ve been ruminating on this SAMBA aio issue because the very large read performance difference first reported by @trypowercyclereminded me of an issue I’ve seen before, but I was having trouble finding that post, now I know why, because those forums are gone? I did finally find it in my content:
And this is the comparison I posted at the time:
So I believe I noticed this issue at around the same time aio was introduced in Samba, and at the time disabling smb3 fixed it, now I wonder if it was already the same issue and disabling smb3 was also disabling aio, symptoms are very similar, and the problem wasn’t controller related but device related, some brands/models perform worse than others, so I now did some more tests with –beta30 and different disks.
Ignore the normal max speed difference from brand to brand, I used whatever disks I had at hand, so some disks are older and slower than others, the important part is the aio on/off difference, tested with disk shares so no shfs interference, all connected to the same Intel SATA controller, each test was repeated 3 times to make sure results are consistent, read speed reported by robocopy after transferring the same large file.
I think the results are very clear, and by luck (or bad luck) the tests this past weekend were done with the only disk that now doesn’t show a significant difference, note that I don’t think this is a disk brand issue, but a disk model issue, likely firmware related, possibly worse in older disks?
I know you already plan to leave aio disable, but still one more data point that I believe really confirms it should be left disable.