We have a central Samba fileserver running on Debian 6, the clients are almost all Windows 7. The server has 7 2TB SATA drives in a RAID 5. The clients are connected to the server with 100 Mbit.
What we noticed was that if one user is performing a large operation, copying gigabytes of data onto the server, that other users were experiencing timeouts and intermittent errors when accessing the share. The share can become almost unusable for some users in such cases.
I checked the network usage on the server with nload
and it shows long stretches with 93 Mbit of incoming traffic, which point towards the network being the bottleneck in this case.
The Samba configuration is pretty much the Debian default, except for the actual share definitions.
Is there any way to prevent one Samba user from causing such an impact on the other users? If multiple users are accessing the server, the available bandwith should be divided reasonably fairly, and one user should not be able to hog so much that other users are severely affected.