How do I increase write speeds to server?

[jchiso]

I have a multi-part Sage system I've been using for several years now, but recently attempted to convert the storage part of the system to Linux. The system had been running WindowsXP. It is now running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) Server. My drives and shares are all properly configured, but write performance to the system's video directory is spotty with HD content. Using WindowsXP I had been able to capture and play back two simultaneous HD streams.

I'm suspecting the culprit here is one of two things:

• The storage drive is a striped RAID volume (using dmraid)
• The storage drive is formatted as NTFS

All of my pre-existing captures on the drive are recogniized and play back correctly. The system has a gigabit ethernet card.

My question is will a change to a native Linux file system (such as xfs) restore the system to its prior level of performance or are such read and write rates not currently attainable with fakeRAID devices and dmraid?

Anyone out there sucessfully using a RAID-based video directory on a network-attached system?

[cenwesi]

definitely switch to xfs, you will notice a speed increase especially when it comes to deleting. Your bottle neck might actually be they way your samba is setup.

[jchiso]

I have not had any problems with deletions, at least not detectable through the Sage interface. Do you have any tips about the samba setup? I am using default values for most of the parameters.

[bcjenkins]

Do you have anything like this in your smb.conf?

socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

[jchiso]

I only have the "TCP_NODELAY" option set. After scouring several online sources I could find none that would guide me on optimally setting the send and receive buffer size parameters. A few places suggested that setting the parameters incorrectly could have extremely negative effects on system performance, so I erred on the side of caution.