frame and large directories

[Andy Smith]

Hi,

We have been using a build from cvs head branch for some time now very
successfully, running on sun sparc/solaris 2.5.1 as both PDC and file/print
server to exclusively NT4/sp3 clients.

We have recently migrated our publicity unit, they were previously
using nfs for file access.  Mostly when we migrated the CAD units from
nfs to samba, there was a performance gain, but this migration has not
been greeted favourably  :-(

I have isolated the problem to their method of working I think, as an
example, they typically have a directory structure like this :-

                                 frame
                   +--------+------+-----+--------+ ......
                  sheets   pics1       pics2    pics3

where 'sheets' contains framemaker documents which load images from
..\pics1, ..\pics2 and so on.  The 'sheets' directory is quite small,
but the pics<n> directories each have typically 500 images (assorted
jpeg, eps, gif), and there are maybe 20 or so of them.  Each framemaker
document references no more than 8 images, and the problem is that with
samba, loading and subsequently manipulating the document is painfully
slow.  If the drive is disconnected, and re-attached with nfs, all is
well again, but there are other reasons for needing to ditch nfs, so
that is no answer.  Moreover, back with samba, if I reconstruct this
hierachy, and empty the pics<n> directories of all but the required 8
images, framemaker is well again (and we see the performance gain I was
expecting).

I have tried the obvious things like getwd cache, wide links, but nothing
seems to improve things dramatically.

I should point out maybe that there are probably 150 people loading this
share now (though probably only 20 people active) and the server is a
64MB SS10 though smbstatus gives me this :-

Share mode memory usage (bytes):
   94896(92%) free + 6256(6%) used + 1248(1%) overhead = 102400(100%) total

Has anyone seen this sort of thing with framemaker before?  Has anyone got
any other ideas I can try to improve performance.

thanks in advance.
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