[SGVLUG] Samba performance issue

[Matt Campbell]

Good afternoon,

My media server project is coming along well, I have purchased an Apple TV
and am hacking it with Linux to act as the client (fall meeting topic?).

I have been running into some performance problems using Windows as the
client.  The Samba server on the Linux platform can spool media all day, but
every 20 minutes or so there is a .5 second hiccup.  Do any of you have
experience tuning a Linux server to remove these problems?

They really hit me this weekend, to the tune of $1200 when I tried to use my
media server as an ad-hoc RAID array for my editing system.  I had 6 hours
of video (12 anime episodes) that I had to output for a client.  Every 20
minutes there was a video hit, it took me 90+ hours without sleep to get
everything back out to tape and I ended up getting hit with two additional
days of equipment rentals.

What types of things can I look at?  Previously it was suggested that the
performance problem was in the VNC client under Windows, but I have not been
able to find or fix anything there.  I assume the problem also occurs in the
VNC client under Linux running off another system serving the data over
Samba, but I have not tested that yet.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions,

Matt