Samba performance with 3+?

[el_grappaduro]

In this 'SBC NAS Group Test' Christopher measures 10.3 MB/s with Samba and a Pi 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsCgXQjaviM

What do you 3+ owners get in the same scenario?

[pretoriano]

Same here.

Prefacing this with the following:
1. I am running a Synology ~1TB NAS which backs up to RPI 3B+ every night via rsync.
2. I run samba on RPI 3B+ and map the share to my workstation on my gigabit network, (I see gigabit speeds to my NAS on the same network).
3. I do all this with a USB external drive and over the network. So I understand I am using the USB 2.0 bus twice (once to read the USB drive, and a second time to send that same data over the network which shares the same bus), so I believe for every file the RPI reads I am cutting my BW in half.
4. I started with RPI 1 B.
5. I upgraded to RPI 2B in 2014. Then to RPI 3 when than launched, then to RPI 3B+ last week. In all cases I merely took the SD card (after upgrading the kernel of course) to the new board.
6. All speeds reported below are exclusively moving large files. When moving small files performance drops, so this is the absolute best case.

The only real improvement I saw was when moving from RPI1 to RPI2B 4 years ago. Single core to quad core allowed me to see transfers of merely 2 to 3 MB/s to now ~10MB/s which I was ok with since I use this unit merely as a disaster recovery scenario (if my NAS exploded).

I expected RPI 3 to increase my network performance output but I guess I am already bottlenecking the USB2.0 + overhead bus, so higher core speed didnt help at all.

Then, I expected RPI 3B+ to increase my network performance since we now indeed have a gigabit chip. But I guess my bottleneck is in the USB 2.0 bus and not in the network chip. I still have the same ~10MB/s performance (I do see peaks of 11 to 12 MBps but not sustained).

I do not think there is anything I can do to improve this since I believe the bottleneck is in the USB bus and so this may very well be the maximum speed these boards will have until (hopefully) we see anything bigger than USB 2.0.

If anyone has any thoughts or recommendations please share.

[DougieLawson]

If you can avoid Samba/CIFS then avoid it. My ancient Zyxel NAS supports NFSV3, so I mount the NFS shares on all fifteen Raspberries. On my B+ I have smbd, nmbd and winbind running so the Windows machines can get to the NAS /home and /shared shares that way.

[el_grappaduro]

If you can avoid Samba/CIFS then avoid it. My ancient Zyxel NAS supports NFSV3, so I mount the NFS shares on all fifteen Raspberries.

But what if I want to use Pi as NAS? No good idea?

[DougieLawson]

Using the RPi as a NAS works best with a USB attached hard drive formatted as EXT4. Serving that out to your network with Samba/CIFS for your Windows clients is perfectly sensible.

[jeffmeden]

Then, I expected RPI 3B+ to increase my network performance since we now indeed have a gigabit chip. But I guess my bottleneck is in the USB 2.0 bus and not in the network chip. I still have the same ~10MB/s performance (I do see peaks of 11 to 12 MBps but not sustained).

I do not think there is anything I can do to improve this since I believe the bottleneck is in the USB bus and so this may very well be the maximum speed these boards will have until (hopefully) we see anything bigger than USB 2.0.

If anyone has any thoughts or recommendations please share.

I feel like you are running into a 100mbit cap somewhere besides the RPi. I Got a few 3b+ units just last week, fired one up with a 1tb usb disk on samba and large file upload/download sustains at 19MB/s. Its still not going to compete with even a cheap dedicated NAS device but its a good step in the right direction thanks to the ethernet bump. If the Pi could get even Multiport USB 2.0 on the SoC (like the Asus Tinker has), that would free things up quite a bit without the struggle to get to USB 3.0.

[LTolledo]

All of my RPis are samba servers and clients at the same time, so I can transfer files between those.

So this time I'll make a 4B file transfer from RPi3B+ to win10pc (old gaming laptop pc with GBE.)
all network connection via LAN cable to GBE Hubs

In win10pc file manager

• accessed RPi3B+ shared home directory
  selected a 4GB video file saved in Stretch's desktop directory
  copied the file and saved it to win10pc desktop
  file transfer speed indicated by windows averaging at 19MB/s (peaks at 23MB/s)
  completed in about under 3 minutes.

4GB Route: RPi3B+ Desktop ---> HUB-B ---> HUB-A ---> Win10pc

Aside from browsing this forum, other network traffic has been suspended during the test
The same RPi3B+ is the one accessing this forum

My other samba test results are here
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=218791&p=1344369#p1344369

[jeffmeden]

samba1-pi3b.png (20.52 KiB) Viewed 11932 times

samba2-pi3b.png (17.97 KiB) Viewed 11932 times

For giggles I tested the SSD and then a ramdisk. Network throughput is very good. Using a USB attached disk cuts it roughly in half which is completely expected since the bus is shared.

[heyyoheisenberg]

I am getting constant 13 MB/s. My setup is 40Gig Intel SSD with raspbian stretch lite using SSD boot, 2nd 1TB WD Portable HD attached in USB. PI is connected with router directly with ethernet and My windows 10 workstation(where I have mapped my smb share) is connected to 5G wifi using PCIE wifi card with dual antennas. Any tweaks I can do to increase this speed ?

[ejolson]

I am getting constant 13 MB/s. My setup is 40Gig Intel SSD with raspbian stretch lite using SSD boot, 2nd 1TB WD Portable HD attached in USB. PI is connected with router directly with ethernet and My windows 10 workstation(where I have mapped my smb share) is connected to 5G wifi using PCIE wifi card with dual antennas. Any tweaks I can do to increase this speed ?

I think 13MB/sec for a Pi 3B+ with a USB attached HD is near the maximum sustained speed possible. The only obvious question is how much of a performance decrease is WiFi causing.

[gkreidl]

I am getting constant 13 MB/s. My setup is 40Gig Intel SSD with raspbian stretch lite using SSD boot, 2nd 1TB WD Portable HD attached in USB. PI is connected with router directly with ethernet and My windows 10 workstation(where I have mapped my smb share) is connected to 5G wifi using PCIE wifi card with dual antennas. Any tweaks I can do to increase this speed ?

I think 13MB/sec for a Pi 3B+ with a USB attached HD is near the maximum sustained speed possible. The only obvious question is how much of a performance decrease is WiFi causing.

I'm getting constant 19.x MB/sec. No WiFi involved, everthing is connected via ethernet.

[ejolson]

I am getting constant 13 MB/s. My setup is 40Gig Intel SSD with raspbian stretch lite using SSD boot, 2nd 1TB WD Portable HD attached in USB. PI is connected with router directly with ethernet and My windows 10 workstation(where I have mapped my smb share) is connected to 5G wifi using PCIE wifi card with dual antennas. Any tweaks I can do to increase this speed ?

I think 13MB/sec for a Pi 3B+ with a USB attached HD is near the maximum sustained speed possible. The only obvious question is how much of a performance decrease is WiFi causing.

I'm getting constant 19.x MB/sec. No WiFi involved, everthing is connected via ethernet.

What kind of USB drive are you using?

[gkreidl]

What kind of USB drive are you using?

3.5 " HDD.

[AndriusWild]

Is having the HDD formatted ext4 a must? Mine is NTFS and the speed is terrible...

[rpdom]

Is having the HDD formatted ext4 a must? Mine is NTFS and the speed is terrible...

It is not essential, but will be considerably faster than NTFS.

If you are not planning to remove the drive from the Pi and plug it directly into a Windows system there is no reason to have it formatted as NTFS.

[LTolledo]

Am also having sustained speed of about 19Mbps on an NTFS formatted bus powered USB HDD on an RPI3B+.

For a RPi2B v1.2 overclocked to 1GHz, with USB GbE LAN adapter, I get about 15Mbps, compared to the on-board LAN's 10Mbps.

Have not tried EXT4 formatted share drives with samba....yet...