Judging from posts here and elsewhere, it would seem that Vista's performance against Samba is still poor (in the range of 5+MB/s for reading and 10+MB/s for writing). Can that really be true?

The release notes for Samba 3.0.25rc2 read in part:

 

"VFS ReadAhead Plugin

====================

 

Windows Vista introduces pipe-lined read support for improved

performance when transferring files.  The new vfs_readahead plugin

allows Linux file servers to utilize additional Kernel buffers

for caching files in order to avoid Disk I/O wait time when serving

Vista clients.  If you experience poor read performance between

Linux servers and Vista clients, please test the vfs_readahead

module by adding the following lines to the share definition

in smb.conf:

 

[file_share]

    vfs objects = readahead

 

Note that this plugin will result in additional RAM requirements

due to the increased amount of kernel buffer caches used by smbd.

Please refer to vfs_readahead( for more information."

 

The readahead module does not appear to be invoked by unRAID. Does anyone know if this is intentional? Limetech?

i don't have help for your particular situation, but i'll chime in on my experience w/ vista's slow network transfer speed, even when the server was windows based.

 

before switching to unraid, my previous OS was win2k3 server, and i experienced extremely slow transfers from server to vista. Vista to server transfers were atleast 65MB+/sec...but Server to vista was only 3-6MB/sec.  I am experiencing the same w/ unraid, the transfer from vista to unraid goes at about 20MB+/sec (i'm guessing b/c of parity write it slows it down), but unraid to vista i barely hit 3MB/sec.

 

Now, when I had win2k3 as my server os, i tried to FTP and see if the problem was with vista's explorer. Thru FTP, i was able to transfer files both from vista to server, and server to vista at full speed 65MB+/sec.  Tried the same file thru the network shares/mapped drives and i only hit like 3-6MB/sec from server to vista. I've tried all the tweaks i can find for vista to maybe resolve this, but no luck so far

 

XP has no such problem, even when using XP's explorer to transfer files.

 

here's a thread where i actually figured out what the problem was (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=866960) and then googled and found out a lot of ppl have the same problem

I'm very interested in this as well and  will add that I've seen the same condition with slow reads (4-5 MB/sec) from UnRAID to a Vista client vs an XP client (20 MB/sec) using the windows file explorer gui *but* I've also seen the same Vista client read at 20 MB/sec at times so it appears there is some condition the Vista client gets in where it will perform slowly for whatever reason.

 

I'm actually still running v3.0 of UnRAID so I was hoping v4.2 would fix this.  My Vista client is 32 bit Ultimate and I do have the KB938979 and KB938194 patches installed.

 

Some more discusision on this

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=c1e49d8c25d15af60472a67935785993&topic=867.0

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=877.0

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/200475.aspx

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=233070&page=3

 

Based on these and the above referenced AVS discussion, the next time my Vista client exhibits this behavior (it's currently in 'fast' mode) I'm planning to try disabling the automatic adjustment for the TCP window size on the network as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932170

 

The onboard nics on my Asus P5W DH do have the 'offload checksum' feature enabled

 

all was fixed for me with vista so 1 rc1,  the current thinking is that explored was not able to detct older samba servers tha didn't support the new options.  So ether adding support via samba package or installing sp1. Will fix it.  I did sp1 as samba wurked perfectly with my other system.

 

 

Rember to only do rc1 or newer

vista sp1 will fix this for sure. i get great speeds since i installed it..

My goodness what a mess!

 

I installed SP1 RC1 only to see Gb network throughput increase from hovering around 5% to a flat 10%. And, then, to a flat 12% when I disabled my wLAN. At that point, I realised that I also suffered from the Vista throttling bug even though I wasn't actually playing back media files over the network at the same time as the transfer. (But, I was transferring a .iso, so perhaps ...)

 

Anyway, Courtney's fix at http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx#1841934 took care of that, and I'm now happily transferring >2GB/min off of the unRAID server. That should work out to an average throughput of 36MBps, or close to 30% of 1Gbps.

 

(To avoid any confusion, the latter numbers are with both LAN and wLAN active, and with Windows audio working as per Courtney's fix.)

 

---

 

PS! Courtney's fix at Courtney's place: http://courtneymalone.com/2007/08/28/a-note-on-vista-network-speed/

for me sp1 rc definitely fixed the issue...except i noticed one thing...

 

copying from a user created share I get about 25-30MB/sec

copying from the actual disk share in the network i get 60+MB/sec

 

is this an unRAID issue or still vista?

copying from a user created share I get about 25-30MB/sec

copying from the actual disk share in the network i get 60+MB/sec

 

I see similar behaviour: 36MB/s from user shares and 50MB/s direct from disk.

for me sp1 rc definitely fixed the issue...except i noticed one thing...

 

copying from a user created share I get about 25-30MB/sec

copying from the actual disk share in the network i get 60+MB/sec

 

is this an unRAID issue or still vista?

in my opinion, it is an unRaid issue.