Lack of performance when copying many files

[juergen at tmt.de]

Hi,

I use samba 1.9.17 to give about 20 Clients (WfW, WinNT)
access to my Linux box. The performance is quite good when I copy
one large file or only some files. But when I copy many files I think
samba produces a great overhead per file. We have a 100Mbit VG100 AnyLan
Network and use orginal cards from HP.


An example:
 
1 file: 52.9 MB from the NT3.51-Server to a NT4.0-Client  35sec =
1.51MB/sec 
        52.9 MB from samba               (the same)       20sec =
2.65MB/sec


A directory with 660 files (files between 30k and 100k):
        29.1 MB from the NT3.51-Server to a NT4.0-Client  25sec =
1.16MB/sec      
        29.1 MB from samba               (the same)       65sec =
0.45MB/sec

I tried this out with some other NT4.0-Clients and even WfW-Clients (of
course they are slower) ,but the factor the performance was reduced is
nearly the same.
I moved the above file and diretory around to other paritions and
harddisks in
my Linux box but it was independent from that. The NT-Server and the
Linux-box
are exact the same hardware.

( By the way, I copied the 660 files with an NT ftp-client. I think
the       ftp-protocol is slower, but the Linux-Box was 50 percent
faster in 
  this contest ) 

I also tried out some smb.conf options (my smb.conf):
[global]
workgroup = VERKAUF
os level = 2
security = user 
keep alive = 30
printing = bsd
encrypt passwords = yes
..
..
..
wins support = no
wins server = ....

;Speed Options
read prediction = yes
; A bit faster with NT-Clients

socket options = TCP_NODELAY
; The Clients are running ACCESS 2.0
; without this option browings through a database 
; is very, very slow.


; I experimented with the options below
; in single or in different combinations
; but it brought no improvement
; locking = no
; read raw = no
; fake oplocks = yes
; strict locking = yes
; read size = 16384
; share modes = no

; My share
[daten]
  path = /disk1/daten
  valid users = @group
  read only = no
  create mode = 0775
  browseable = yes
  
Has anyone a similar problem with samba? What can I do to reduce the
overhead per
file, which I believe, samba produces?

Thanks!

CU Juergen