FrameMaker/SAMBA issue

[Christopher R. Hertel]

> Hello,
> 
>         Over the last week or so I have been
> trying to
> discover exactly what the issue is with Adobe
> FrameMaker and SAMBA.  I think I may be able to
> put my finger on it now.  I hope someone of the
> SAMBA developer team will be able to take a look
> at the code and correct this if it is in fact a
> bug in the code.
> 
> Users working on FrameMaker projects served from a
> *NIX box running SAMBA, (only tested this on IRIX,
> linux and Solaris) experience sub acceptable
> performance with page refresh/loads.  The same
> projects served from a native NT file server
> allowed users to experience near local
> performance.  The same projects served from the
> same *NIX box but via NFS (NFS service installed
> on NT client) seen near local performance. 
> Indicating perhaps an application issue.
> 
> The image format of choice by FrameMaker folk tend
> to be TIFFs.  SAMBA it seems has a hard time
> opening Tiffs in an efficient manner.  Replace the
> TIFFs with almost any other image file format and
> performance shoots threw the roof even if they are
> of the same size.  (thankfully microsloth didn't
> use tiffs in any of the benchmarks  they
> sponsored).  In a high debug mode you can see
> SAMBA stuck in a routine that it seems to execute
> several times per TIF file.  I also noticed if you
> reduce the TIF to 256 shades of gray things speed
> up considerably as well.

Which routine?  That would help a lot.

My completely wild guess is that the reading of a TIFF file involves a lot
of random access, and that we are crossing some sort of buffer boundary.

I do not know how data is stored in a TIFF file, but the fact that a
change in pixel depth would change the read characteristics suggests to 
me that deeper pixel depths require more reads on Samba's part.

Very, very wild guess.

Chris -)-----

-- 
Christopher R. Hertel -)-----                   University of Minnesota
crh at nts.umn.edu              Networking and Telecommunications Services

    Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them
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