Fast SMB transfers!

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

Had the Vero 4K+ for around 2 years now, and SMB shares mounted within Linux FS have always performed slower then what was possible with iperf/FTP. I can get around 90Mbps over my crappy powerlines, but SMB with high bit rates it would sometimes peek at 90Mbps but hover around 40-50Mbps most of the time, which caused depleted Kodi buffers with high bit rate UHD films. I put this down to SMB not being very good.

To my surprise SMB is now consistently running at line rate, and Kodi buffers are enough to fill in those short bitrate peeks within films.

So does anyone know if this is due to the new OSMC linux kernel, Kodi update or Windows 10 updates?

2

What jellyfish sample can you run without stuttering :astonished:

3

It’s possible there were some performance improvements when upgrading to Debian Buster if you’ve noticed this improvement in the last couple of months.

Thanks for the report.

4

I was attempting some benchmarks today, using an SMB source mounted with autofs, and if I’m reading the numbers right it’s being limited by gigabit Ethernet speed rather than OS overhead(!).

Am I actually doing this right? If I am, that’s rather impressive.

dd if='Parasite (2019).mkv' of=/dev/null bs=4M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB, 3.9 GiB) copied, 36.0969 s, 116 MB/s
5

You are hitting about 930Mbps which is the theoretical maximum, so yes, that’s a PHY limitation you are hitting.

6

What I meant was, is the result of executing that command actually a reasonable measure of real-world data reading performance?

If it is, and if there are no hidden gotchas (e.g. extra CPU overhead), then an autofs SMB mount now performs just as well as an autofs NFS mount, meaning I can stop using Hanewin on the server and just connect via SMB instead.

7

Assuming that you issued the command from one of your network folders then the result is “real-world” and you should be fine using that instead of NFS

8

Yes.