Samba – SVN under samba in virtual box very slow

Mac OS X's TCP delayed ack implementation's default mode of operation seems to run afoul of some SMB servers on some networks. Do this:

$ sysctl net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack

...and see if it's set to 3 (the default, at least as of Mac OS X v10.6 "Snow Leopard"). If it is, try setting it to 0 (off):

$ sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

...and re-run your test. You may need to unmount any mounted SMB shares and re-mount them, so that you're creating new TCP connections to the server after changing your Delayed Ack setting.

If that solves the problem, you can make that change automatically take effect on every boot by creating a file:

/etc/sysctl.conf

and have it contain the line:

net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

Have the files and directories owned by a group, which Apache runs as. Make the directories SGID.

chgrp -R group1 /path/to/htdocs
find  /path/to/htdocs -type d -exec chmod 2775 {} \;

Specify this group under the SAMBA share, which can be done with force group=group1.

Make the user you authenticate to SAMBA with a member of this group. Specify this user within valid users and write list within your share in SAMBA. This should also allow you commit to SVN.

Also, specify create mask=0664 and directory mask=2775 within smb.conf, which will set the appropriate permissions upon creation. If the files are owned by the same user as Apache, you can set the final bit to 0 on both settings.

If everything is applied consistently, you should be able to perform all desired actions without negatively impacting any functionality.