Increasing the speed of Samba

Often found that Samba is slow, for some reason?

The socket option TCP_NODELAY is the one that seems to make the biggest single difference for most networks. Many people report that adding socket options = TCP_NODELAY doubles the read performance of a Samba drive. The best explanation I have seen for this is that the Microsoft TCP/IP stack is slow in sending TCP ACKs.

Simply add this following line under the [global]-section of your smb.conf:

ocket options = TCP_NODELAY  IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_SNDBUF=65535 SO_RCVBUF=65535

And restart the service. Notice the difference?

If not, it might be a problem with Windows. Often a speed problem can be traced to the client. The client (for example Windows for Workgroups) can often be tuned for better TCP performance. Check out this article to find out more about what you can do to increase the speed.

Good luck!