SMB Server and slow transfer speeds...

jcroson · 09-12-2003, 11:03 AM

I am having SERIOUS file transfer issues from a Linux SMB server to a Mac running OS-X.

My setup:

Win2k Domain / DB / Exchange Server
Linux File / Web / Backup Server
30 Win2k Clients
1 OS-X Client
2 Netgear DS524 Hubs

I get great performance on all accounts from the file server with the windows clients.

When the Mac user tries to transfer files from the server, it is painfully slow. I've commented out the references to the send and recieve buffer size, but that makes no difference.

I would like to get to the bottom of this, because it also appears to be affecting it's Outlook / Exchange traffic. It is not unusual for the Classic environment to "lag" periodically during the day. The report I get is that it is somewhat smooth in the AM...

This sucks.

JC

__________________
------------------------------------------
Certified LinuxZealot
11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

knowmad · 09-12-2003, 11:22 AM

ok, the usual networking questions:
How many active networking ports are open on the mac?
check by looking at the network pref pane and looking at the 'Show:' pull down menu. The bottom choice "Network Port Configuration" lets you delete and deactivate extra ports. This turns out to be importantbecause otherwise the mac checks all active ports for sending/recieving each and every packet (or so i am told). and worse comes to worse its a simple first step.
next, chek the cables and the ports, easiest thing to do, if the mac sits near a PC that works fine, just switch the tailing end (not the wall side, but the comp side) of the network cables, that in effect changes both cbale and port in one easy shot. then test both machiens. if the pc slows down and/or the mac speeds up, you have found a major portion of your problem.
Next, how much ram does the machine have? How many extra little programs ahve been put on it that use up bandwith/CPU/RAM? I had a client who spent three hours on the phone with me complaining of slow email and file transfers and neglected to tell me about the 30 or so extra doodads running on the machine. When i explained that each one, the weather checker, the three chat clients, the P2P client, the screensaver as desktop pattern, the little barking doggy, the US flag, the dancing girl, etc. ... that each one takes up just a bit of ram and cpu and bandwith, and that all together they kill the machine, the user said "OH, then i guess when i installed them all yesterday, that would explain why things slowed down" yes, however the user was an artist and refused to get rid of them so I had no good way of speeding up the machine.
ie, check for exta crap and enough ram.

also, just cause it can't hurt, when was the last time you ran permission fixer (in disk utility)? And out of curiosity, have the daily/weekly/monthly cron jobs been running? ie has the machine been on and awake all night? the cron jobs will only run if the machine is both on and awake at night at like 3 or 4 am. If you don't wnat to leave it on and awake all the time, get ResurrXtion (search versiontracker for it) to turn your machien on or wake it up at the right times.

i think thats a good start.
Knowmad

jcroson · 09-12-2003, 11:46 AM

There is only one port configuration, ethernet. The machine is a dual 877 with 768 mb of ram. Speed is not an ussue. The only apps running that take up excessive bandwidth or CPU usage is Classic and Outlook connecting to the Exchange server. This is clearly an issue with the Samba server and OS-X because I can download files faster from the internet than I can on the local lan. I also changed the cat5 with no diff.

Thanks for all your input.

JC

knowmad · 09-12-2003, 12:10 PM

I looked around and your not the only one, not by a long shot, who is having this dificulty.
I did not, however see any answers.
My suggestions are:
look on google groops
look on AFP548.com
post your findings back here.

sorry i can't help more, i have not yet myself had this problem and without being there I have little I can do.... myabe if you post the log files from the SMB service we might find something?

knowmad

jcroson · 09-12-2003, 12:34 PM

The mac:

[STATION10:/Volumes/company/Technology] marketing# ls -la
total 632907
drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Sep 12 08:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Sep 12 07:42 ..
drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Apr 4 14:39 Access articles
drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Apr 4 14:39 Alpha ECU
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 315922432 Sep 10 10:23 Dec2002DevToolsCD.dmg.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 782148 Jun 2 08:58 ffbgalmac.zip
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 7279051 Jun 26 11:18 lccinstalldisk111.dmg

[STATION10:/Volumes/company/Technology] marketing# time cp ffbgalmac.zip /Users/administrator/Desktop
0.000u 0.010s 0:04.03 0.2% 0+0k 0+2io 0pf+0w

The Fileserver on loglevel 2:

[2003/09/12 11:25:39, 2] smbd/open.c

pen_file(245)
JZALEWSKI opened file Technology/ffbgalmac.zip read=Yes write=Yes (numopen=1)
[2003/09/12 11:25:43, 2] smbd/close.c:close_normal_file(213)
ramart+jzalewski closed file Technology/ffbgalmac.zip (numopen=0)

That is just too long...

I'm going to recommend that she keep her machine on and see what happens.

Just for the record, I had a similar setup at another location, but with an NT fileserver, and never had these issues.

JC

anthlover · 09-13-2003, 01:43 PM

I had this happen once and it got better. I reset/rebooted both systems... Not that is your problem ... ** What version of OSX??

----
As a test why not make a new Admin level account on the Mac and try the share thing again and see what happens.

You have more or less eliminated the network and PC so somthing must be up on the mac.

Beyond the new account, Permissions or Dir damage may be an issue too.

jcroson · 09-15-2003, 09:34 AM

The OS is 10.2.6, and rebooting the Mac is no problem. We do that every day. I'm sure the issue is with the Mac, since most articles I've read have indicated that the downstream is affected, not the upstream, which is the case here. I can upload a sizable file to the file server in resonable time, but to download is a pain.

I'll try the new account.

Thanks.

JC

knowmad · 09-15-2003, 12:26 PM

Ok, i read somewhere here (past forum post on similar subject, can't find it or i would link to it) that sometimes the macs will miss-auto-negotiate duplex in one direction only, a way around this to set the duplexing and not let it autonegotiate. So, set duplexing and speed, don't let it autonegotiate, you do this the easy way with maintain1 or the hard way by finding and editing the appropriate settinsg files. I suggest getting maintain1 from versiontracker and using many of its scripts often as needed. makes life easy.
I am still waiting for a friend of mine to give me some more insight into your issues, he deasl with mac/linux transfers all the time.
knowmad

anthlover · 09-15-2003, 01:19 PM

Some OS and Some hardware have issues with Auto.

I doubt that is the case here, though anything is possible.

jcroson · 09-15-2003, 03:43 PM

My problem appears to be OSX itself. Changed the duplexing option in a shell, no diff. Rebooted into OS9, downloaded and installed an evaluation version of Dave for OS9, and the Mac transferred a large file in the same amount of time the Win2k clients do.

Since that part is isolated, I wonder where to go from here? Is this an OSX bug in the new update? I'm running 10.2.6...

JC

anthlover · 09-15-2003, 03:53 PM

What happended to creating a new account??

At least you eliminated the NIC on the MAC

jcroson · 09-15-2003, 03:58 PM

No change. I had an admin account set up long ago, and even checked the *GULP* root account..."bad admin, bad". No diff.

This is pretty bizzar, no?

hayne · 09-15-2003, 04:23 PM

Quote:


	Originally posted by knowmad Ok, i read somewhere here (past forum post on similar subject, can't find it or i would link to it) that sometimes the macs will miss-auto-negotiate duplex in one direction only

Maybe you were thinking of the following thread?
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...=&postid=56740

I also suggest that you look at the output of 'netstat' while doing the slow transfers to see if there are a large number of errors or retransmissions, etc.

jcroson · 09-15-2003, 04:30 PM

That I was getting my fair share of bad packets. Maybe 10% or so.

JC

anthlover · 09-15-2003, 06:48 PM

Anyway..

Here is how to set Speeds to various Locks including Full Duplex Lock:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107475

Good Luck

P.S. Unix is fun but this should be the GUI....

jcroson · 09-16-2003, 08:58 AM

I tried this already in a term. Made things worse, and to top it off, it had autoselected half-duplex in the first place, which was correct. My fileserver nic drivers HATE misconfigured nics on the network (thank you Donald Becker), and log excessively if ANYTHING is set to full-duplex.

I'm glad I've got it isolated to OSX, just have to keep plugging away to find a solution.

JC

hayne · 09-16-2003, 11:11 AM

You might try running the diagnostic tool from this web site:
http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/

It is intended for diagnosing Internet connectivity problems but if you can make your Internet connection go via the same routers that connect you to the file servers, it might prove useful.

breen · 09-16-2003, 11:21 AM

Quote:


	Originally posted by jcroson I tried this already in a term. Made things worse, and to top it off, it had autoselected half-duplex in the first place, which was correct.

Right.
The rule is very simple:
Never Force Full Duplex.
It doesn't solve any problems and usually makes things worse.

Breen

jcroson · 09-16-2003, 11:23 AM

Here are the results:

TCP/Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.2.0f
click START to begin
Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done
running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 654.77Kb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 456.62kb/s
Your Workstation is connected to a Cable/DSL modem

Looks pretty good to me. I'm not sure were to go from here.

JC

anthlover · 09-16-2003, 12:38 PM

As an FYI Sun Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 running Solaris 2.51 and 2.6 do strongly prefer being locked and @ 100 Full. Not relevant here though

---------------

Okay ball of confussion.

Do we have another X mac that is working, as we have already extablshed that all is hunky Dory from this mac in 9.x

09-12-2003, 11:03 AM	#1
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	SMB Server and slow transfer speeds... I am having SERIOUS file transfer issues from a Linux SMB server to a Mac running OS-X. My setup: Win2k Domain / DB / Exchange Server Linux File / Web / Backup Server 30 Win2k Clients 1 OS-X Client 2 Netgear DS524 Hubs I get great performance on all accounts from the file server with the windows clients. When the Mac user tries to transfer files from the server, it is painfully slow. I've commented out the references to the send and recieve buffer size, but that makes no difference. I would like to get to the bottom of this, because it also appears to be affecting it's Outlook / Exchange traffic. It is not unusual for the Classic environment to "lag" periodically during the day. The report I get is that it is somewhat smooth in the AM... This sucks. JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23 __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-12-2003, 11:46 AM	#3
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	Well... There is only one port configuration, ethernet. The machine is a dual 877 with 768 mb of ram. Speed is not an ussue. The only apps running that take up excessive bandwidth or CPU usage is Classic and Outlook connecting to the Exchange server. This is clearly an issue with the Samba server and OS-X because I can download files faster from the internet than I can on the local lan. I also changed the cat5 with no diff. Thanks for all your input. JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-12-2003, 12:10 PM	#4
knowmad Major Leaguer Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: NY Posts: 259	bad news I looked around and your not the only one, not by a long shot, who is having this dificulty. I did not, however see any answers. My suggestions are: look on google groops look on AFP548.com post your findings back here. sorry i can't help more, i have not yet myself had this problem and without being there I have little I can do.... myabe if you post the log files from the SMB service we might find something? knowmad

09-12-2003, 12:34 PM	#5
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	A test... The mac: [STATION10:/Volumes/company/Technology] marketing# ls -la total 632907 drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Sep 12 08:38 . drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Sep 12 07:42 .. drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Apr 4 14:39 Access articles drwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 16384 Apr 4 14:39 Alpha ECU -rwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 315922432 Sep 10 10:23 Dec2002DevToolsCD.dmg.bin -rwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 782148 Jun 2 08:58 ffbgalmac.zip -rwxr-xr-x 1 jzalewsk wheel 7279051 Jun 26 11:18 lccinstalldisk111.dmg [STATION10:/Volumes/company/Technology] marketing# time cp ffbgalmac.zip /Users/administrator/Desktop 0.000u 0.010s 0:04.03 0.2% 0+0k 0+2io 0pf+0w The Fileserver on loglevel 2: [2003/09/12 11:25:39, 2] smbd/open.cpen_file(245) JZALEWSKI opened file Technology/ffbgalmac.zip read=Yes write=Yes (numopen=1) [2003/09/12 11:25:43, 2] smbd/close.c:close_normal_file(213) ramart+jzalewski closed file Technology/ffbgalmac.zip (numopen=0) That is just too long... I'm going to recommend that she keep her machine on and see what happens. Just for the record, I had a similar setup at another location, but with an NT fileserver, and never had these issues. JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-13-2003, 01:43 PM	#6
anthlover Hall of Famer Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 3,620	I had this happen once and it got better. I had this happen once and it got better. I reset/rebooted both systems... Not that is your problem ... ** What version of OSX?? ---- As a test why not make a new Admin level account on the Mac and try the share thing again and see what happens. You have more or less eliminated the network and PC so somthing must be up on the mac. Beyond the new account, Permissions or Dir damage may be an issue too.

09-12-2003, 11:22 AM	#2
knowmad Major Leaguer Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: NY Posts: 259	ok, the usual networking questions: How many active networking ports are open on the mac? check by looking at the network pref pane and looking at the 'Show:' pull down menu. The bottom choice "Network Port Configuration" lets you delete and deactivate extra ports. This turns out to be importantbecause otherwise the mac checks all active ports for sending/recieving each and every packet (or so i am told). and worse comes to worse its a simple first step. next, chek the cables and the ports, easiest thing to do, if the mac sits near a PC that works fine, just switch the tailing end (not the wall side, but the comp side) of the network cables, that in effect changes both cbale and port in one easy shot. then test both machiens. if the pc slows down and/or the mac speeds up, you have found a major portion of your problem. Next, how much ram does the machine have? How many extra little programs ahve been put on it that use up bandwith/CPU/RAM? I had a client who spent three hours on the phone with me complaining of slow email and file transfers and neglected to tell me about the 30 or so extra doodads running on the machine. When i explained that each one, the weather checker, the three chat clients, the P2P client, the screensaver as desktop pattern, the little barking doggy, the US flag, the dancing girl, etc. ... that each one takes up just a bit of ram and cpu and bandwith, and that all together they kill the machine, the user said "OH, then i guess when i installed them all yesterday, that would explain why things slowed down" yes, however the user was an artist and refused to get rid of them so I had no good way of speeding up the machine. ie, check for exta crap and enough ram. also, just cause it can't hurt, when was the last time you ran permission fixer (in disk utility)? And out of curiosity, have the daily/weekly/monthly cron jobs been running? ie has the machine been on and awake all night? the cron jobs will only run if the machine is both on and awake at night at like 3 or 4 am. If you don't wnat to leave it on and awake all the time, get ResurrXtion (search versiontracker for it) to turn your machien on or wake it up at the right times. i think thats a good start. Knowmad

09-15-2003, 09:34 AM	#7
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	Well... The OS is 10.2.6, and rebooting the Mac is no problem. We do that every day. I'm sure the issue is with the Mac, since most articles I've read have indicated that the downstream is affected, not the upstream, which is the case here. I can upload a sizable file to the file server in resonable time, but to download is a pain. I'll try the new account. Thanks. JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-15-2003, 12:26 PM	#8
knowmad Major Leaguer Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: NY Posts: 259	duplexing? Ok, i read somewhere here (past forum post on similar subject, can't find it or i would link to it) that sometimes the macs will miss-auto-negotiate duplex in one direction only, a way around this to set the duplexing and not let it autonegotiate. So, set duplexing and speed, don't let it autonegotiate, you do this the easy way with maintain1 or the hard way by finding and editing the appropriate settinsg files. I suggest getting maintain1 from versiontracker and using many of its scripts often as needed. makes life easy. I am still waiting for a friend of mine to give me some more insight into your issues, he deasl with mac/linux transfers all the time. knowmad

09-15-2003, 01:19 PM	#9
anthlover Hall of Famer Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 3,620	Some OS and Some hardware have issues with Auto Some OS and Some hardware have issues with Auto. I doubt that is the case here, though anything is possible.

09-15-2003, 03:43 PM	#10
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	New news... My problem appears to be OSX itself. Changed the duplexing option in a shell, no diff. Rebooted into OS9, downloaded and installed an evaluation version of Dave for OS9, and the Mac transferred a large file in the same amount of time the Win2k clients do. Since that part is isolated, I wonder where to go from here? Is this an OSX bug in the new update? I'm running 10.2.6... JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-15-2003, 03:53 PM	#11
anthlover Hall of Famer Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 3,620	What happended to creating a new account?? What happended to creating a new account?? At least you eliminated the NIC on the MAC

09-15-2003, 03:58 PM	#12
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	I guess... No change. I had an admin account set up long ago, and even checked the GULP root account..."bad admin, bad". No diff. This is pretty bizzar, no? __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-15-2003, 04:30 PM	#14
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	I did notice... That I was getting my fair share of bad packets. Maybe 10% or so. JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-15-2003, 06:48 PM	#15
anthlover Hall of Famer Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 3,620	locking is Only Good if both Side Agree Anyway.. Here is how to set Speeds to various Locks including Full Duplex Lock: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107475 Good Luck P.S. Unix is fun but this should be the GUI....

09-16-2003, 08:58 AM	#16
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	Thanks, but I tried this already in a term. Made things worse, and to top it off, it had autoselected half-duplex in the first place, which was correct. My fileserver nic drivers HATE misconfigured nics on the network (thank you Donald Becker), and log excessively if ANYTHING is set to full-duplex. I'm glad I've got it isolated to OSX, just have to keep plugging away to find a solution. JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-16-2003, 11:11 AM	#17
hayne Site Admin Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Montreal Posts: 32,473	diagnostic tool You might try running the diagnostic tool from this web site: http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/ It is intended for diagnosing Internet connectivity problems but if you can make your Internet connection go via the same routers that connect you to the file servers, it might prove useful.

09-16-2003, 11:23 AM	#19
jcroson Prospect Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 30	Thanks for the tip. Here are the results: TCP/Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.2.0f click START to begin Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 654.77Kb/s running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 456.62kb/s Your Workstation is connected to a Cable/DSL modem Looks pretty good to me. I'm not sure were to go from here. JC __________________ ------------------------------------------ Certified LinuxZealot 11:25:54 up 14965 days, 22:26, 1 user, load average: 1.27, 1.29, 1.23

09-16-2003, 12:38 PM	#20
anthlover Hall of Famer Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 3,620	as an FYI Sun Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 running As an FYI Sun Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 running Solaris 2.51 and 2.6 do strongly prefer being locked and @ 100 Full. Not relevant here though --------------- Okay ball of confussion. Do we have another X mac that is working, as we have already extablshed that all is hunky Dory from this mac in 9.x