Improving transfer speed for SAMBA

Samba will allow you to share directories for Windows Client. Installation is pretty simple so you can install samba on Ubuntu server with #apt-get install samba. After having samba installed, you have to decide what directory to share and what kind of security to use. Security is very interesting since you can design your server to use AD security from the network or use local user database.  Finally you have a samba server in you rnetwork where you can share directories with all the other user, however if you start to copy a lot of data to your samba server you will notice that the transfer speed is very low. I would say almost the same that FTP.
The following tests show how to improve the transfer speed on the Samba Server changing basically two parameters.

Requirements:

One Ubuntu server with SAMBA
One ubuntu with smbclient and smbfs

Testing for different configuration

On server smb.conf

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

On Client:

# mount -t smbfs -o rw,username=mpi //load01/data /mnt
# cd /mnt
# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 3.93339 s, 26.7 MB/s

On server

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=16384 SO_SNDBUF=16384

On client

# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 2.08827 s, 50.2 MB/s

On server
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=32768 SO_SNDBUF=32768

On Client
# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.5947 s, 65.8 MB/s

On server:
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=65536 SO_SNDBUF=65536

On Client:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.56355 s, 67.1 MB/s
On Server:
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=262144 SO_SNDBUF=262144
On Client
# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.52957 s, 68.6 MB/s

On Server:
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=524288 SO_SNDBUF=524288

On Client:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.46897 s, 71.4 MB/s

On Server:
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=1048576 SO_SNDBUF=1048576

On Client:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.45731 s, 72.0 MB/s

Note:  This test assumes that you are writing data to the Samba Share. Changing those values definitively shows an improvement in transfer speed, however I have not tested all the possible scenarios. 
On server, the local transfer speed is the following: 

# dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=10240 bs=10240
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.242673 s, 432 MB/s

Still I have pending to verify why the transfer speed is so low comparing to create the file locally. If somebody has found the reason of such  a difference..please let me know.