LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 7:26 am Post subject: Optimize CIFS?

Is it possible to somehow optimize CIFS on a WAN other than using some sort of WAN optimizer?

CIFS seems to like to eat my bandwidth a bit, I've talked with Communications at my corporate office asking them if they could enable CIFS compression/optimization on our WAN Optimizer, but they don't seem to want to do that for some reason.

Any thoughts on what I could do?

Screenshot from my optimizer.

This is inbound traffic over a 3 week period.

Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 5:37 pm Post subject:

To answer your question I have no clue if there is a way.

I was planning on doing a WAN optimization too, here in a few weeks. So I will take a look and see if I can find something.

But just as a note, if you do go with a WAN optimizer, I suggest against Riverbeds Steelhead devices.

Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2007 6:38 am Post subject:

Blue Coat also does WAN optimization.... not an endorsement on my part Laughing

Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2007 10:06 am Post subject:

I don't get the choice sorry to say. My corporate office issued me a Packeteer Packetshaper, one for each site. I know they do CIFS compression/optimization, I just don't have the access to them to set it up, and the guy that has the access won't do it for some reason.

He keeps telling me I need control my HTTP traffic before he'll do compression, even though you can see by that screenshot that normal HTTP traffic doesn't even make it into the top 10 protocols list for usage.

Oh, and he has access to these charts, they're created by the Packetshaper which he controls.

Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2007 11:13 am Post subject:

is there another head you can talk to that's higher than his?

that might light a fire under his arse... but may put you on his bad side in the future... but it may be worth a shot.

Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:09 am Post subject:

with your ~~disco~~ cisco router, it's possible to enable interface-level compressions such as predictor/stack/etc but note that this is interface level and applies on all sort of traffic (not only cifs), also they will lead to more cpu/ram usage (predictor: more ram, fewer cpu. stacker: more cpu, fewer ram - depending on link speed)

IIRC the only sort of compression that you can apply it selectively (e.g. only applied on CIFS) is tcp or rtp header compression. this works well when you have lots of headers passing the link. lots of headers mean small payloads - good example is telnet where the payload is one byte, not sure how well this works with your CIFS traffic.