Samba configuration options when using with FUSE file system

[Jim Casey]

It seems that metadata operations involved in writing new files into the
same directory become increasingly expensive as the number of files
grows larger.  Determining whether a file exists in a directory (in our
case this will never be true since we are always writing new files)
seems like it should be a simple operation, but in fact seems to involve
a huge number of opendir->readdir->closedir calls.  I am using Samba to
share a FUSE filesystem for which these directory operations are very
expensive compared to file systems like ext3.

Are there configuration options in Samba that would help us out in this
case, perhaps by caching directory information or some such?

Thank you for any assistance you are able to provide.

James Casey