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RPi and Samba
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RPi and Samba

Thinkin about buying a raspberry pi and put samba on it.

But I have no idea about ram usage of samba so I don't know which model to pick.
Will have about 3 accounts. We also want to be connected with our phones to it will be 6 connections (Windows, Mac, Windows) (Android, iPhone, Android). But I am not even sure if samba allows 2 connections on 1 account so if anyone can shed some light on that. Would be great.

So anyone got experience with samba on RPi? I have no idea which model is right for the task so asking you guys.

Comments

  • Samba doesn't need that much ressources. Anyway, I would suggest a BananaPi as the LAN port of the Raspberry Pi is quite bad. It has only 100MBit/s and shares its power with the USB ports (which means it's even slower).

    Thanked by 1netomx
  • SnapeSnape Member

    I have a Model B (the original, single-core version) running smbd or whatever it's called under Raspbian. It's abysmally, ludicrously slow, because everything hangs off USB. The best I ever see is a bit below 600kbps down from it, and somewhat less up. (To/from a USB drive, mind. Haven't tried the SD card, and don't want to.) I doubt the newer version of the RPi would fare much better, since i/o is still crippled by the USB bus.

    The Banana Pi is far, far better as a fileserver. Native LAN (not USB->LAN), and SATA. (Mind you the gig-e port is limited to something like 600Mbps, but that's better than 100 limited in practice to 80-ish.) And it can run actual native Debian, not a custom port for the obsolete CPU of the RPi. And is only a few bucks more.

    (Smbd only takes about 22MB of RAM on my pi. It'd probably run just as well on something like a Pogoplug as on an RPi, if not better. And Pogoplugs seem to show up now and then for ~$10 each, new.)

    Thanked by 1netomx
  • TheLinuxBugTheLinuxBug Member
    edited April 2015

    @Snape that seems weird as I have a RPi B+ and as long as you are not using encryption you should be able to get near 100mbit from it (10000kb/sec) and with encryption about 5M/sec (5000kb/sec) at least this is what I am able to do from FTP/Samba from an attached 2.5" 1.5TB USB drive. I also have a RPi 2 and it gets even better throughput as you have 3 additional cores to spread the load across, so it handles much better. Can do closer to 8M/sec encrypted. This is being limited by your available CPU not by the USB chip. If you are running anything and more than 50% of your cpu is used, you will see really poor speeds as there is not enough CPU left to do any better. My tests were done with no additional services running or XBMC, etc. Only the smbd server and pure-ftpd.

    Edit: Also the Cubieboard A10 is cheaper than the BananaPi. It has 1Ghz core, 1Gb ram and SATA on board with 100mbit nic and supports Debian. You can find them from $35-$40 shipped on Ebay and they also have a 4GB NAND chip on board so you don't have to rely on SDcard, unless you want to.

    Cheers!

  • SnapeSnape Member

    Are you running Raspbian, or some other distro? I know there have been extensive threads on the RPi forums about lackluster samba performance, and no real consensus as to the solution, except "suffer".

    I'm doing an encrypted transfer right now off it, getting an average of about 86KBps to a Debian desktop. Load on the pi is only 0.3ish, but it's doing 5700 interrupts and about 1400 context switches/second. smbd is only using 3% of the CPU; the rest is from kworker threads, presumably handling all the USB interrupts.

  • So its RPi 2 vs BananaPi? Hmm though choice. Will have to check if my router has 100Mbit ports or 1Gbps. But either way all devices use WiFi so I don't think 1Gbps would make a difference. But the SATA port seems good regarding io bottleneck. Hmm.

    My plan is get an USB drive and USB hard drive and sync them once a day (maybe hourly but depends on how much data it will be getting shot with). Not that much io will happen because its for family purpose so mainly backup photos and documents, music. Usual stuff.

  • NomadNomad Member

    @TehEnforce said:
    So its RPi 2 vs BananaPi? Hmm though choice. Will have to check if my router has 100Mbit ports or 1Gbps. But either way all devices use WiFi so I don't think 1Gbps would make a difference. But the SATA port seems good regarding io bottleneck. Hmm.

    My plan is get an USB drive and USB hard drive and sync them once a day (maybe hourly but depends on how much data it will be getting shot with). Not that much io will happen because its for family purpose so mainly backup photos and documents, music. Usual stuff.

    If you have wireless n and can use 300Mbps, then it has at least 3x faster speeds, how is that no different?

    Connect the Banana to the ethernet port of the router and get maximum speed.

  • @Nomad said:
    Connect the Banana to the ethernet port of the router and get maximum speed.

    300Mbps on N only works when im next to the router. And even then 300Mbps probably won't make it. They make claims in a lab in a optimal enviroment so in real you probably won't get even close to that.

    Still a banana seems like an option but im getting mixed views about the RPi 2 good or not for the job.

  • sc754sc754 Member

    @Snape said:
    Are you running Raspbian, or some other distro? I know there have been extensive threads on the RPi forums about lackluster samba performance, and no real consensus as to the solution, except "suffer".

    I'm doing an encrypted transfer right now off it, getting an average of about 86KBps to a Debian desktop. Load on the pi is only 0.3ish, but it's doing 5700 interrupts and about 1400 context switches/second. smbd is only using 3% of the CPU; the rest is from kworker threads, presumably handling all the USB interrupts.

    Using an ext filesystem on your external drive will improve performance a lot vs NTFS. Also, check your samba settings, you can do a lot of tweaking

  • @sc754 said:
    Using an ext filesystem on your external drive will improve performance a lot vs NTFS. Also, check your samba settings, you can do a lot of tweaking

    Ahh, yes, I only use ext4 on my external drive. NTFS does have quite a bit of overhead if you are trying to use a drive formatted in that manner it may very well be effecting your throughput.

    When I get a chance again here I will perform some tests and let you know what I see currently and if I can come up with any tweaks.

    Cheers!

  • SnapeSnape Member

    @sc754 said:
    Using an ext filesystem on your external drive will improve performance a lot vs NTFS. Also, check your samba settings, you can do a lot of tweaking

    Sadly, it already is EXT4, mounted noatime. And I tweaked /etc/samba/smb.conf per whatever the currently popular recommendations were back in July, when I set this RPi up. It just refuses to be fast at Samba, which is fine; I mostly just use it for downloading from usenet, which it performs quite admirably at.

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