[Samba] How important are oplocks?

[Brad]

Hi Bob.

I had never had anything to do with the oplocks switch with routine samba 
shares for file access, but I recently commissioned a new Samba server (Red 
Hat 8.0) which is running a Windows time and attendance database and we had 
intermittent problems opening a database session from various Windows PCs. 
The Windows error was indicating that the database was in use and could not 
be accessed by another user. Sure enough, when no one was logged in and one 
workstation accessed the database, they could apparently get in every time. 
However, this is a multi-user database that everyone should be able to get in 
to.

By applying "oplocks = no" to the samba share, the problem was solved with 
everyone now able to open a session every time. As speed is not crucial to 
our usage I have not noticed any speed degradation.

Regards,
Brad


On Wednesday 18 December 2002 17:00, bob at nleaudio.com wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm wondering just how critical it really is to turn off oplocks.  It
> appears that not only Windows 2k server, but also Netware 5 and above
> defaults to having these enabled.
>
> I just spoke with two software companies running databases off of file
> servers (no database server, just MDAC stuff), and they had never heard of
> it, much less require it to be disabled.  Everything I've read online says
> to turn them off, but I'm getting a serious performance hit with these
> turned off, compared to the Netware server that Samba just replaced.
>
> Comments???
>
> Bob