Converter is slow when accessing files via Samba Options

[hcorM]

Hello,

I was not sure whether to post the issue here or in general discussion as this does not really bother me but I rather found it interesting. I have all my music on NAS running Debian Linux with Samba 3.6.6. The NAS is connected to my computer by 1Gbit Ethernet and I usually achieve transfer speeds up to 110MB/s. My own PC is a Windows Vista x64 machine with Core2 Quad Q9300 (4 x 2.5GHz).

Since I usually work with music on my NAS, I noticed a strange thing. I used to convert music on a PC and by then I usually achieved converting speeds at around 75x (fb2k set to use 3 CPU cores). However when the source files are on NAS, the speed drops down to roughly one third. The CPU usage lowers as well, so it seems to be a problem of accessing data rather than a CPU performance issue.

Does anyone have any idea what might cause this drop in overall converting peformance?

I am using foobar2000 version v1.1.14a and Nero AAC Encoder v1.5.4.0. However this drop occurs with other encoders too (LAME, oggenc).

Thank you,
hcorM

This post has been edited by hcorM: Oct 15 2012, 20:12

[kode54]

Try again with a single conversion thread. It may go faster.

[hcorM]

Try again with a single conversion thread. It may go faster.

Hello,

thanks for your reply.

I tried using 1 thread and the encoding speed is rougly at 2/5 of the usual performance (9x compared to 25x), so it doesn't seem to be a threading problem either.
Also I tried reading input files from NAS but saving output to local disk and the speed is at max (75x for 3 threads), so it seem to be a writing issue.