smbfs very slow

[Hactar]

Hi.  I downloaded the mailing lists archive (all 90MB of it), and did not
see this problem.  Maybe my searching methods leave something to be
desired; if this is a FAQ, pointers will be appreciated.

I have a Linux 2.4.7, Samba 2.2.1a machine (pc -- both a SMB client and
server), a Win95 machine (superman -- SMB client only), and a Win2000
machine (goliath -- SMB client and server).  They were named by three
people; that's why there's no theme.

When I mount a dir from goliath to pc, using the command

mount -t smbfs -o credentials=/home/eben/goliath.credentials,uid=500
//goliath/catalog ~eben/temp

I can "cd" into ~/temp (as eben), and do an "ls" (or at least I could
_this_ time, when I tried).  I see what I should.  If I run "strace find
temp2/" from ~, it waits on getdents().  If I wait long enough, it'll
continue, only to get hung up on a getdents() or a some flavor of stat().
If I hit ^C, there's a long wait (minutes to hours), then the process
(usually) exits.

Doind a "cat file > /dev/null" completes in a reasonable time, but there
was a long delay doing a tab-completion on the filename.

I thought it was "too many files in a directory" causing the problems, so
I broke up the files.  There are now 27 sub-directories (not counting
hidden ones) totalling ~5700 files.

Every 15 minutes or so, I get these (or something similar to them) in
/var/log/messages:

Oct  3 15:50:06 pc kernel: smb_get_length: recv error = 110
Oct  3 15:50:06 pc kernel: smb_trans2_request: result=-110, setting invalid
Oct  3 15:50:06 pc kernel: smb_retry: successful, new pid=25354, generation=2

The last message is just smbfs reconnecting a mount, and I think the
second one is too.  How about the first one?

I can supply smb.conf, if that's needed.

I upgraded from 2.0.6 (after finding out that 2.0.7 was the first release
to support w2k), so there might be a few bits of 2.0.6 hanging around.  I
know I haven't got rid of the man pages yet..

Thanks for any hints.

-- 
-eben             eben at gate.net           http://home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar/
                    "God does not play dice" -- Einstein
            "Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws
            them where they can't be seen." -- Stephen Hawking