Strange performance issues with samba and win commander

[Fritz, Wolfgang]

Hi,

In our company I've setup a Samba server in addition to the NT file
server and got complaints about performance problems when copying files
from local drives to the samba box with win commander.

The samba box:
Athlon 1400 MHz, 256MB RAM, 80GB IDE Hard disk. SuSE Linux 7.2 with
Kernel 2.4.4 and Samba 2.2. Filesystem is ReiserFS.

The Windows Box(es)
different Hardware running W2000 with Windows Commander 4.51
 
I did the following test:
Copy one directory with 560 MB in files of abt 30MB from local disk to
the Samba or the NT server. I get the following results:


Copy to Samba with Explorer         :    65 sec
Copy to Samba with win commander    : > 300 sec (I terminated the test
before finish)
Copy to NT server with Explorer     :    60 sec
Copy to NT server with win commander:    60 sec

So the results for standard explorer copy are comparable (and OK), but
the performance for Win commander is extremely bad with Samba.

I searched the mailing list and read the files Speed*.txt in the doc,
played with the tuning parameters but with no significant inprovement.

My question are: 

What can be the interaction between an application and the samba server
that decreases performance so dramatically? 

What could be a systematic way to pin down the problem (Tests, parameter
changes)?

Please ask if you need additional information.

Wolfgang

-- 
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Wolfgang Fritz                    Phone: +49-511-978197-647

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