AutoCAD R14 and SAMBA 1.9.18pl8

[cjwoods at evolv.com]

Hello,

We've had serious performance problems loading AutoCAD R14 .dwg files from a
VAResearch VArServer 3000 (dual 400MHz PII, Red Hat 5.0, SAMBA 1.9.17p4,
256MB RAM, 36GB RAID5). The problem is that on first access, trying to read
the .dwg file is very, very slow -- a 10MB .dwg file loaded from an NT4.0sp3
server using a win95 station using AutoCAD R14 and SoftDesk AutoArchitect
takes in the neighborhood of 30 seconds. The same .dwg file loaded from the
linux/SAMBA server takes somewhere around 4 minutes. I upgraded to
1.9.18p8 -- no joy. I've tried various permutations of options in my
smb.conf, including fake oplocks, read raw and write raw, max xmit, various
socket options, read prediction, read size...

Please note that this is exclusive to AutoCAD, and is different from the
oft-reported bug with .dwg files opening read-only, although I suspect the
origin of the problem may be the same -- the fact that AutoDesk has changed
their resource locking mechanism. Also note that subsequent loads of the
same .dwg file are blazingly fast, probably because they're in the server's
disk cache, being loaded from memory rather than from disk.

Below are the relevant sections of my smb.conf for 1.9.18p8:

[global]
  max disk size = 500
  max xmit = 8192
  fake oplocks = yes
  guest account = pccad
  remote announce = 192.9.200.255/JSAINC.COM
  security = share
  socket options = IPTOS_LOWDELAY
  read prediction = yes
  read size = 16384
  read raw = yes
  write raw = yes
  getwd cache = yes
  local master = no
  wins server = 192.9.200.253
  wins proxy = yes
  dns proxy = no

[pdrive]
  path=/u1/pdrive
  browseable = yes
  public = yes
  guest only = no
  writable = yes
  printable = no

[smbtest]
  path=/u1/smbtest
  writable=yes
  guest only = no
  public = yes
  browseable = yes


Has anybody seen this problem? I know some have, since I've seen a similar
problem posted in the archives. However, I have not been able to determine
whether or not there is a solution. My butt is more or less on the line,
since the main fileserver here is currently an NT machine, and I fought very
hard for linux and SAMBA to replace the NT box. Now it doesn't look very
good when the SAMBA machine isn't holding its own. I know it's probably not
specifically a SAMBA problem, but the suits don't care -- it works with NT,
it doesn't with linux/SAMBA.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

(Jeremy Allison: I am the guy with the problem Larry Augustin at VAResearch
contacted you about. Feel free to contact me directly, off-list if you wish,
at any of the contact numbers/addresses in my .sig.)

/cjw


--
    ) Chris Woods  +  cjwoods at evolv.com (
    ) Senior Developer, Network Systems (
    ) EVOLV LLC + http://www.evolv.com/ (
    ) v: 603-436-6868 + f: 603-436-5760 (