locking retry timeout too long?

[Marcus Graf]

Hi :-)

At one of our customers we've just replaced a NT server with a linux 
box (2.0.35) and samba (1.9.18p10). The workstations are connected 
via a 100 MBit Ethernet.

After installing linux and samba one application had a great LOSS in 
performance. The program uses a >16 MB MS-Access database. From one 
workstation it ran great, with two workstations it slowed down. With 
four or more it was unusable.

Playing with smb.conf we've tracked this down to a locking problem. 
With 'fake oplocks = yes' everything worked fine (except that we 
of cause had database consistency problems).

After some wasted hours I gave up and asked a friend who knows a lot 
more about networks and C programming than I do. He looked over the 
samba code and found out: In local.h the lock retry timeout is set to 
100 ms. He told us, this would be to long for a fast network. 

We changed the value to 5 ms and recompiled. -> Success!

Was this the right way to solve the problem? Or does anyone know a 
better solution?

Ciao
  Marcus

* We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over 
* time, without a plan, on top of ruins. 
* (Ellen Ullman, "The dumbing-down of programming")