variable share connect times ... how to speed up ?

[Randy Banks]

All -

Many apologies if the following is covered in the documentation, but 
I've looked through it all and can't find it.

My question: what conditions affect the speed with which samba 
allocates a share requested by a client and how can I speed up the 
process ?

Background: I have a number of NT 4/SP 4 clients accessing a number of 
Unix boxes running samba 2.0.6 which are, in turn, known by a variable 
number of netbios names.

The speed with which an NT client connects to a share on a samba server 
depends on the netbios name by which the server is called.

Connecting to another share using the same netbios name reuses an smbd 
process on the server and is therefore quicker than starting a new one 
(and authenticating the client).

On average I can connect to a share about 50% quicker if I re-use a 
server's netbios name, which comes out to about 2.5 to 3 seconds in my 
case. Sometimes, however, I can make an almost instantaneous connexion 
(> 200 ms), but I can't figure out why. It seems to have something to 
do with re-using an smbd process that was established when NT mounted 
my home directory (as stored in my profile), but that's as much as I 
can make out.

Many TIA.

randy

----------------------
Randy Banks (randy at essex.ac.uk)
ISER, University of Essex
Colchester, Essex, UK  CO4 3SQ
tel: +44 (0)1206 873 067; fax: +44 (0)1206 873 151