Samba 4.18 Released With Performance Optimizations

Samba 4.18 is out today as the popular open-source implementation of the SMB networking protocol that allows for file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems in an Active Directory (AD) environment.

With Samba 4.18 introduces new performance enhancements, synchronization improvements with Azure Active Directory / Office 365, bug fixes, and a range of other improvements.

There are performance improvements with Samba 4.18 following recent regressions caused by security improvements around symlink race conditions. With Samba 4.18 the locking overhead is lower when dealing with contended path-based operations. Samba 4.18 has around 3x lower overhead in this area and the throughput of open/close operations is restored to around Samba 4.12 performance levels.

Samba 4.18 also has improved error messages for Samba tools, color output support for Samba tools when using the "--color" option, a new option to change the NT ACL default location, and Microsoft Azure Active Directory / Office 365 synchronization improvements. Use of the Microsoft Azure AD Connect Cloud sync tool is now supported for password hash synchronization so that the Samba AD Domains can synchronize passwords.

Samba 4.18 downloads and more information on the changes via Samba.org.