Slow SMB access from Ubuntu

Hello,

I run Libreelec on a Raspberry Pi 2 and I think it's great! I have an hard disk full of media files attached to the raspberry and shared via smb to my local network. Access to the smb shares from an Android tablet is fast, access from Windows 10 is fast, access from Ubuntu 18.10 is very slow: every time I connect from my Ubuntu system with nautilus there is a 1-2 minutes delay before I can browse the files shared. Do you know what could be the cause of this behavior and how to fix it?

Thanks!

Quote from Klojum

I think you've set up your harddisk share the wrong. Meaning, the RPi shouldn't act as a file server. The RPI itself should be a Kodi client, and get its files via the network. It also has a flawed 100Mb/s port, as the RPi hardware isn't capable of sustaining the full network throughput.

Your Ubuntu machine is much more capable of serving files. I've been running XBMC and Kodi for some 7 years problem-free now with Ubuntu as file servers. I am using NFS though, not SMB by the way.

I see what you mean but I won't keep my ubuntu desktop with its power-hungry i5 cpu and nvidia gpu always on just to serve media files on the network. I think the probelm I'm experiencing it's something related to the ubuntu smb client or possibly the file manager (nautilus). As I said, access from a cheap Android tablet is pretty fast, i.e. no problem watching 1080p video streams.

Quote from pajtaz

Tonyrh,

Root cause could be the way that Kodi mounts SMB shares. Sometimes the access to these Kodi mounted SMB shares is fast and sometimes it is slow. It varies between which operating system is accessing the SMB shares. I had a similar/same issue and posted about it in Kodi forum. see the thread here: Kodi forum post

In short, the main way to get always fast access to SMB shares in Kodi is to manually mount them as described here: Mount Network Share

If you do this, you should always have fast access, no matter from which operating system and machine. If you still have problems with speed then I would not know what the problem is and how to fix it. Just make sure if you mount the SMB shares manually to remove them from Kodi first (by removing them inside of Kodi).

I think you misunderstood my problem: the hard disk with the media files is physically attached to the Pi and mounted by automount (autofs); the Pi is then sharing those files over the network, using the smb server implementation in Libreelec.