frame and large directories

Florian Laws florian at void.s.bawue.de
Fri Apr 23 06:00:15 GMT 1999


On Thu, Apr 22, 1999 at 12:32:45AM +1000, Andy Smith wrote:
> 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  :-(
> 
[...]
> 
> 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've experienced similiar problems with the I386 directory of an NT4WKS
Installation CD mirrored on one Samba share on Linux/x86, 
Samba CVS from yesterday
I guessed it was an ext2fs weakness on large directories,
but since you run Solaris and have no problems when sharing with NFS, 
perhaps there are some strange interactions between Samba and the filesystem,
that cripple performance. (wild guessing :-)

I'm interested what the developers say.

Thanks,

Florian


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