Delays opening Excel/Word files off samba shares.

Noel Kelly nkelly at tarsus.co.uk
Fri Dec 21 14:48:05 GMT 2001


I was forced to disable oplocks after we had another instance of an
unkillable smbd three days after our server went live - ouch!  (I had a bad
time with 2.2.19/2.2.2/acls and Win2000 clients and got unkillable processes
almost on demand - recompiled everything with 2.2.20/2.2.2/acls).  I had
read on this list that disabling oplocks would fix this unkillable process.
Incidentally. we had had oplock errors messages littering the logs.

We have now been up for eight days without a problem (and long may it
continue - unkillables won't allow the raid array to be unmounted...) and
the logs are clean of errors.

Moving on to the main point though, in disabling oplocks we have had little
or no performance degradation (about 30 clients thus far) and have had no
trouble at all with several users opening Office 2000 files.  I believe that
NT/2000 clients will request locking the file themselves and smbstatus seems
to report the files as locked.  As a case in point, we have a shared Excel
spreadsheet we fill in hours spent on projects.  If someone has this open
then Excel throws up the 'This file is locked - Notify etc etc' and it works
without a hitch.  We also are running the Sage accounting suite off the
Samba shares and similarly have had no problem with file locking.

I would be tempted to examine the users claims that files were being
overwritten - they didn't get the Office 'this file is read-only' message ?

Hope this is of some help.  Do the files open quicker when you try and
disable oplocks ?  Or is this thread becoming a red-herring for you ?

Noel

-----Original Message-----
From: Mitch McNeel [mailto:mitchm at mwh.com]
Sent: 21 December 2001 21:51
To: Rashkae
Cc: Pierre Belanger; Samba
Subject: Re: Delays opening Excel/Word files off samba shares.


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
>>>>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>Hewlett-Packard                                     http://www.hp.com
>>>>SAMBA Team                                       http://www.samba.org
>>>>--                                            http://www.plainjoe.org
>>>>"Sam's Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours" 2ed.      ISBN 0-672-32269-2
>>>>--"I never saved anything for the swim back." Ethan Hawk in Gattaca--
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
>>>>instructions:  http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>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
>>>
>>>--
>>>To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
>>>instructions:  http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
>>>
>>>
> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 
                           |||||
                         ((~) (~))
                          ( (_) )
                           { ~ }
                             V
----------------------oOO0-----0OOo---------------------------------
Mitch McNeel                               # Phone Ext. 2236
Unix Systems Administrator                 # Phone Num. 858-831-2210
Maintenance Warehouse/A Home Depot Company # http://www.mwh.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------


-- 
To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
instructions:  http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba




More information about the samba mailing list