Delays opening Excel/Word files off samba shares.

[Mitch McNeel]

Hmm, interesting point..  I tried disabling oplocks all together, but that 
caused more problems then it was worth.  Users were complaining that changes 
made to documents were being overwriten when there were two users using the same 
document (windows didn't report locks on the file).  This is the reason I had to 
find a solution to the delay of opening documents and spreadsheets.  I'm 
including the man page documentation for oplock break wait time. What I 
understand from reading this, is that this is a setting to help with the windows 
clients missing the oplock break request.

Man page:

oplock break wait time (G)

     This is a tuning parameter added due to bugs in both Windows 9x and WinNT. 
If Samba responds to a client too quickly when that client issues an SMB that 
can cause an oplock break request, then the network client can fail and not 
respond to the break request. This tuning parameter (which is set in 
milliseconds) is the amount of time Samba will wait before sending an oplock 
break request to such (broken) clients.

     DO NOT CHANGE THIS PARAMETER UNLESS YOU HAVE READ AND UNDERSTOOD THE SAMBA 
OPLOCK CODE.

     Default: oplock break wait time = 0

Mitch

Rashkae wrote:

> Hmm, this is more than a little out of my area of expertise (which is, in
> truth, very very narrow :) ), but I do know from painful experience that
> oplocks can be dangerous, even without adding Samba to the mix....
> 
> If you have to tinker with oplock break time out settings, you might be
> much safer to disable oplocks entirely for your environment, otherwise,
> there might be some file inconsistences or lost changes from the client
> that is not releasing the oplock on a break request.
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Mitch McNeel wrote:
> 
> We have had this problem also.  What I did (found) was to change the smb.conf
> parameter "oplock break wait time" to 10 milliseconds.  This seemed to reduce
> the number of clients have the delay on opening Word and Excel documents.  Try
> this out and let me know.
> 
> Example:
> 
> [global]
> 
> 	oplock break wait time = 10 (default is zero 0)
> 
> Mitch
> 
> Pierre Belanger wrote:
> 
> 
>>>it takes about 1 minute to open a excel-file
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>This really looks like the problem I am having with the traffic
>>on port 135/UDP (Microsoft Localisation Server ... loc-srv).
>>
>>When I open a Word file which has a link to a visio file, I see traffic
>>coming on port 135 from the Windows workstation. Because there's
>>nothing on my Samba server listening on port 135, the Windows
>>station "times out" and then finishes reading the files.
>>
>>Does your Excel file has external links to another file? Can you
>>check with tcpdump what's the traffic between your samba server
>>and your windows client box and let us know what's going on... ??
>>
>>Pierre B.
>>
>>Anders Widman wrote:
>>
>>
>>>2001-12-17 18:14:32, "Gerald (Jerry) Carter" <jerry at samba.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Charles Marcus wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>This is another area that concerns me.
>>>>>
>>>>>I've been reading a lot about problems with Office files.
>>>>>
>>>>>Does anyone know of the specific circumstances where these problems
>>>>>arise? Or is it a mystery?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>We attempt to do regression testiong specifically against Office
>>>>97/2000/XP and are not seeing these delays in our tests.
>>>>Doesn't mean that they aren't real.  We just are seeing them during
>>>>development.
>>>>
>>>>To the original poster: Can you try to reproduce this against the
>>>>latest SAMBA_2_2 cvs code?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>chau, jerry
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>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Well.. I have this problem also. This does not happen verry often, but when it does, it takes about 1 minute to open a excel-file.
>>>
>>>//Anders
>>>
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>>>
> 
> 
> 
> 


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