Large file deletion on large directories

[Trevor Nuridin]

I am using a samba server for a large number of files. It is a MS VSS
database which splits it's data into a-z directories and generally in each
directory I have about 30,000 files. When trying to delete files from the
VSS client, the file deletion process is very slow, taking around 15 seconds
per file.

What is strange is that the processor loading is only at %60 during this,
the rest is in the idle process. The VSS client is not the culprit here, as
a check on processor status on the NT client shows that it's taking
absolutely no time while all this is going on, it's waiting on the server to
finish.

Why am I only seeing less that 100% CPU loading during this intensive task ?
What can I do to speed up this process beside adding another CPU ? I am
using samba 1.9.18p10 on Debian 2.1


-Trevor