I have have been testing the Samba functionality in openwrt x86. The speed and functionally is fantastic. Except for one thing that I can't figure out. Once I transfer 8gb to the networked drive, my ram is full and everything slows right down (8gb of ram on the PC). The used ram only gets released if I erase the files copied to the networked drive and speed picks up considerably. Any ideas?
What filesystem you are using to back samba?
The drives filesystem is NTFS. Was reading some suggested ex4 because native, but no examples this fixing anything definitively. And my drives are mostly full with NTFS format. So would be a pain.
It is a matter of choice. If you do not use linux native filesystems you get such performance. ntfs3 documentation explicitly states only nfs export is supported.
I will have to experiment. Although I was very impressed with the speeds and how well everything worked, never seen anything like it. There is no add-on or code that can be written to dump the catched ram on the openwrt machine after a file is transferred to its local usb drive? The openwrt machine uses a lot of ram to send files, but promptly dumps the ram when finished.
After much struggling. I am now reading off a ext4 formatted disk. NTFS works the same or better. So the question becomes, while the high ram usage appeared to slow things down..maybe it's normal and the ram is released as needed? Read speeds slow down but I was unable to see a significant general router slowdown(network traffic)
That's fairly unsurprising. The files you copy to your Samba device will temporarily go to its RAM first, from which they will then be written to disk. Naturally, writing to RAM is a lot faster than writing to disk, and when there's no RAM left to temporarily store your data the speed drops to how fast it can write to disk. What you experience as "slowdown" is the actual, unbuffered write speed to your disk. And that's also the speed you can expect if you turn off the intermediate RAM buffer.