[lug] Samba, VPN, unison & speed

[Ben Luey]

I'm running Debian Squeeze with Samba 3.5.6 and OpenVPN. It works fine, 
but using file sharing over the VPN is very slow. I've read that the smb 
protocol doesn't play nice with network latency, etc, so maybe there is 
nothing I can do about it, but I'm curious if anyone has any 
suggestions. Transferring large files utilizes at best 20% of bandwidth 
(direct wireless connetion to the vpn, or fast internet connection) (On 
wired 100MB/s ethernet without VPN, I get 50% utilization). Doing lots 
of dirs and small file look-ups are significantly slower. This is 
particularly a problem when using unison to sync diectories on a Windows 
machine (fastcheck is enabled in unison), which is really mostly what I 
care about.

I've tried adding
max protocol = SMB2 to samba, but speed tests under Win 7 & Ubuntu 11.10 
were the same. Maybe the solution is not to have unison run on top of 
windows file sharing, but users don't have shell/ssh access so I don't 
know how else to do it.

Any ideas appreciated. Thanks,

Ben