Samba Speed Question - Please Help!

Justen Marshall justen at al.com.au
Fri Oct 6 05:49:58 GMT 2000


Hi

"Dave Dezinski" <ddez at cbf.com> writes:

> A few months ago, we did some testing of Samba with 3000 files in a
> directory.  I wrote a simple program that would create 3000 zero
> byte files, named 1, 2, 3, etc.
> 
> Using a Win98 client we tested this with Samba 2.0x running under
> Solaris 7.0, OpenBSD, Linux w/EXT2, and Linux with the ReiserFS.  In
> every instance the file creation got slower and slower, and the CPU
> usage would gradually increase to the point of 80-100%, this only
> with a single Win98 client!

That seems to agree with my own tests, which seem to indicate that
Samba is the weak link here. I can copy the very same files around
with MUCH lower CPU utilisation using other methods (NFS, FTP and rcp
to name a few).

Your comments about the ReiserFS interest me too. Some readers of this
list suggested it may have been a solution to my problem. I don't
think I can use it because my server is an SGI, but your tests seem to
indicate that the file system itself is not to blame anyway.

> We've got a few NT40 servers that have more than 20000 files in a
> single directory, that don't perform this badly.  We'd like to
> replace these servers with Linux boxes using Samba, but unless we
> re-organize these files into multiple directories (which means a
> bunch of custom software needs to be rewritten), this isn't
> possible.
> 
> This definately is a problem that should be a looked into, this is
> not the first time I've seen someone complain about this.  Spliting
> the files up into multiple directories, is just a temporary
> workaround, not a solution.

Yep. The software we're using is 3rd-party, we cannot change it's
underlying fundamental structure.

> Dave Dezinski

Justen
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