Very Slow SMB (and AFP) Transfers (iPad)

[darrenscerri]

Hi everyone,

I am using a 3 x 2TB unRAID Server where I store all my media. I stream the media to a WD TV Live using a wired connection and have very good performance with regards to snappiness etc. (nearly identical to a USB HDD!). I also occasionally stream media to my MBP using Wi-Fi and the transfer speed saturates the Wi-Fi router (about 3MB/s - using 802.11g router with negotiated speed of 24Mbps).

 

The problem is when I try to stream media to my iPad. The actual data transfer rate was at most 100KB/s (tried to download some files using ezShare and FileBrowser). After numerous tweaks, I managed to get the transfer rate to about 300KB/s, which is still, well, disastrous.

 

I installed "TCP Optimizer" (from here: http://goo.gl/aXJXY), which increased the throughput. I think mainly because it disables TCP delayed ACKs.

 

I also added these attributes to the smb-extra.conf:

[global]
max open files = 16500
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_KEEPALIVE IPTOS_LOWDELAY IPTOS_THROUGHPUT SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072
host msdfs = no
msdfs root = no
kernel oplocks = no
oplocks  = no
level2 oplocks = no
min receivefile size=16384
use sendfile=true
aio read size = 0
aio write size = 0
write cache size = 65536
domain master = no
local master = yes
preferred master = yes
os level = 50

 

I also tried AirVideo but it still hangs occasionally even at low bitrates...

 

Is there something I am missing? I would really be happy if I could stream HD movies to the iPad!

[Johnm]

I stream to my ipad/iphone via XBMC.

 

My ipad is jailbroken and i installed xbmc on it.

 

I turned on UPNP inside xbmc on my mac mini.

 

i pointed my ipad to the upnp on the mac mini. bearly any dropped frames on 1080p via wifi on ipad..

 

i know there are better ways to do it. but this worked and hardly watch movies on my ipad so it was a no brainer.

 

[darrenscerri]

With a transfer rate of about 300KB/s, I would be lucky to stream normal SD movies without problems...

 

Mac OS X has a long history of problems with SMB connections, so I believe some problems still exist in iOS. I believe that the problem can be fixed by a Samba setting from my unRAID Server to gain compatibility with iOS, as there doesn't seem to be any problems with other iPad users using SMB connections.

 

Anybody have any idea?

[darrenscerri]

UPDATE:

I created a SMB share from my MBP using Wi-Fi and managed a constant transfer rate of about 850KB/s (which is understandable as the data is transmitted and received through Wi-Fi).

 

So the problem is with the SAMBA or TCP configuration on the unRAID server, which for some reason is kind of incompatible with iPad.

 

I also noticed that when transferring a file using SMB on the iPad, the transfer rate starts off at about 400KB/s and degrades to about 250KB/s through the transfer.

 

Any help???

[darrenscerri]

UPDATE 2:

 

I installed unRAID 5.0beta12a to test using AFP. The transfer rate is the same as SMB (about 300KB/s) so the problem seems to be in the TCP settings of the linux kernel. I have tried the following sysctl parameters and have achieved an increase in throughput (max: 450KB/s, low: 250KB/s).

 

sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=16777216
sysctl -w net.core.wmem_max=16777216
sysctl -w net.core.rmem_default=65536
sysctl -w net.core.wmem_default=65536
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_rmem='4096 87380 16777216'
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_wmem='4096 65536 16777216'
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_mem='8388608 8388608 8388608'
sysctl -w net.ipv4.route.flush=1
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_fack=0
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_mtu_probing=1
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_rfc1337=1
sysctl -w net.core.netdev_max_backlog=2500
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save=1
sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_moderate_rcvbuf=1