[Samba] Samba Performance question

[Dragan Krnic]

> ext2/ext3 manipulate the directory entries using lists 
> so if you have a great many files in one directory you
> will see performance issues as you describe. The answer 
> to this is to change filesystem - no mean feat with your
> data sizes.  Filesystems like XFS and ReiserFS use binary
> trees to manipulate the directory entries and it is a far
> faster way of doing things with crowded directories so 
> you should see an improvemnet.

Migrating to another file system should not be a big headache, if
you have the means (free disk space, tapes). Such a shame ReiserFS 
has no ACLs. By far the best for such situations.

> I suppose an alternative short term solution is to get
> the users to break large directories up into small ones
> if the data lends itself to it.

Divide and conquer. But maybe there are simpler ways. My
impression is that all transactions are significantly faster
on a Samba than on the comparable Windoze. I'd like to
reproduce your problem. Could you be more specific? Could
you take a representative directory, copy the structure
somewhere else, i.e. just empty files with identical names,
tar it, gzip it and attach it to your mail? Give precisely
the command you're using and the timings you get, network
conditions, platform, version etc. and I'll see what's wrong.

As I said, what turned me on to Samba was when I saw how fast
it could compute a directory size in a property box. With the
copy of the same directory on both sides Samba was beating
Redmond hands down with a factor of at least 10 on any vaguely
non-trivial hierarchy.


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