Blog Series: Wiring the house for a Home Network - Part 5 - Gigabit Throughput

[mouser]

Scott Hanselman writes a pretty nice and lighthearted blog on programming tools and related things.  He's recently been describing his new home networking setup, and it's a good read because he goes into some real detail about choices he made and issues he's solved..

I posted earlier about copying files across my new Gigabit home network. I was getting about 10 MB/s (that's MegaBytes) between two laptops and I got responses like these in the comments that shook my confidence. Here's my thoughts after each interesting comment that appeared in the previous post:  "You should be pushing at least 100 megabytes per second with gigabit ethernet."

http://www.hanselman...oughputAndVista.aspx

[f0dder]

Well, what can I say? The SMB/CIFS protocol sucks

[Gothi[c]]

Never use Windows/SMB to copy large or many files across the network. It is REALLY REALLY slow.
Even with scp/ssh/sftp copying you get faster speeds and that adds encryption...

[f0dder]

SMB/CIFS has the advantage that you can run stuff directly off it, etc (okay okay, sftpdrive or something can do the same), but... grmbl. It irks me that I can't seem to get better than 30MB/s throughput to samba (or other XP boxes, for that matter), while the network can handle at least 90MB/s...

scp (with PuTTY pscp) speed measure in kilobytes rather than megabytes right now, gotta see if I can fix that :/

[tinjaw]

I haven't even read the article yet, but as I started reading that quote and got to, "I was getting about 10 MB/s (that's MegaBytes) between two laptops" I knew without a doubt this was going to be due to SMB.

And Samba has a difficult time when run on certain kernels that have a bug in the library that limits SMB to about 4.3 MB/s.