Ok, there's a bit more to the story than the title implies.
Background and Environment: I'm copying several TB from an older Ubuntu server to a newer Windows 2012 server over SMB. (Technically, it's commodity hardware, but they're servers around here.) Everybody is on a gigabit LAN, and the older Ubuntu box has a bonded interface. I believe the Ubuntu server has two Rosewill PCI-e 1x ethernet cards and the Windows server has one reasonably nice PCI Intel ethernet card.
The destination computer (the Windows server) is running a Storage Pool with parity over 4x 2TB drives. It is running Microsoft's new ReFS. The source computer (the Ubuntu server) is running a software RAID mirror. It is running good ol' EXT4.
The two servers are running through a single gigabit switch. I have experimented with breaking the bonding on the source (Ubuntu) computer without any improvement.
Problem: I have no trouble transferring at reasonable speeds from other computers to the Windows server. Other computers can hold 50-80MB/s without much difficulty, but transferring from that Ubuntu server tops out at no more than 20MB/s. 4+TB at 20MB/s takes a long time (something like 2.3 days), and I'm wondering what I can do to figure out where the bottleneck is.
Symptoms: CPU on both computers is pretty minimal, and certainly not prohibitively busy. Hard drives on both computers are active but not swamped, and CPU IOwait is almost 0% on at least the Ubuntu server.
I did a Wireshark trace for 35 seconds (presumably long enough to make sure all ACKs were for new packets) and noticed that there were quite a few things I didn't expect. (1) There weren't any checksums for the ACKs (and SOME SMB packets) from Windows to Ubuntu. However, Wireshark claims that this may be due to "IP checksum offload." Ok, I have a pretty nice card in there. I suppose it is possible that the network card could do checksum calculations. Fine. Moving on... (2) "TCP ACKed unseen segment." This one I have a problem with. The ACK number is within an acceptable range from what I can tell, and there are often huge blocks of these messages. Perhaps Wireshark is just too slow?
Summary: Transfer speed sucks (20MB/s over gigabit ethernet) and I don't know why. Wireshark claims Windows is ACKing things that were never sent by Ubuntu.
Guesses: My initial guess is that the cheaper Rosewill cards are getting swamped. My second guess is that the software RAID-like things on one end or the other is getting inundated with stuff to do.
sshd
is eating up 60% of one processor on the Knoppix side. In any case, my transfer is nearing completion. @Dom: Now that you mention it, I don't recall putting all that data on there much faster than 30MBps in the first place.