netatalk file transfer to real mac very slow

[Rachel Greenham]

Binary package hint: netatalk

In some recent change somewhere, copying files over afp from a netatalk server to a mac has become very slow. speeds of about 500KB/s on a gigabit link. Copying files in the other direction is still fine, between 20-40MB/s for me depending which mac I'm testing with.

While I've marked this a netatalk bug, that's mainly because that's what it most *affects* from a user's pov; there are indications that it may be an upstream kernel vulnerability. For instance, see this new thread on lkml: http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/1/25/324 I haven't done all the tests he's done, but it certainly looks like the same problem. One difference in my case is that I'm *not* running netatalk inside VMWare but on a 'real' machine, so we can probably discount vmware as a factor.

(I'm reporting it here rather than polluting lkml with my novice rantings ;-) but it's probable that ubuntu kernel/netatalk devs will want to follow it)

OK, system, version info:

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy
rachel@mab:~$ uname -a
Linux mab.local 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Dec 18 05:28:27 UTC 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux

netatalk 2.0.3-6ubuntu1 (self-built with ssl auth as per instructions here: http://www.damontimm.com/blog/how-to-install-netatalk-afp-on-ubuntu-with-encrypted-authentication/

The filesystem is ext3 on a 5 disk RAID5; but I doubt that's a problem; I'm getting 40MB/s transferring the file using wget, for instance. (Also, if anything, you'd expect the copy *to* the netatalk server to be slower, not faster.)

The mac systems on the other end are an iMac Core Duo and a Macbook Core 2 Duo both running Leopard 10.5.1, all up to date.

[Rachel Greenham (rachel-strangenoises)]

Addendum: I reinstalled with Gutsy Server, and held back the kernel from upgrading, and everything seems to be fine.

So right now I have linux-image-2.6.22-14.46-generic. Beforehand I had allowed it to be upgraded to 2.6.22-14.47. So it looks like it's a change introduced in .47? :-) The changelog doesn't list anything that looks like a smoking gun to me, but <shrug/>. I'm rather loath to allow that upgrade as I don't know how to revert it without a full reinstall. :-}

In the interim I had tested with an installation of Gentoo in VMWare Server (running in my previous Ubuntu installation), and that too managed a much better throughput when copying a file from it to a mac via afp. That test was running with the current-stable gentoo-sources kernel, which is based on 2.4.23. (I only didn't stick with that solution because I had problems with using NFS to mount the host to serve the data out.

However, also in the interim, I installed the alpha of Hardy Heron, and that exhibited the same problem.

[Rachel Greenham (rachel-strangenoises)]

This seems to be fixed as of linux-image-2.6.22-14.52-generic (just upgraded-to).

[Ian Weisser (ian-weisser)]

Since this issue seemed to be fixed by an upgrade, I'm marking this bug 'Invalid'.
If the problem recurs, please reopen the bug.