[Samba] Slowdown and errors

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 11:10:03AM +0100, Martyn Ranyard wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
>    I am having some strange problems on a customer site :
> 
>    I am pretty sure I disabled oplocks entirely - I don't like the idea of 
> them, and would rather have stable data.
> 
>    The customer (5-10 users) runs Sage Line 50, and until recently was 
> getting numerous errors within sage.  We have temporarily replaced their 
> switch and this has reduced the fatality rate and a few corruptions.  They 
> still however get a message along the lines of "waiting for file 
> index.dta".  I have looked into the logs and found no errors apart from the 
> standard anonymous access not allowed type messages.  If anyone knows 
> wether Sage Line 50 requires oplocks or has a configuration that works 
> solidly with it, please step forward.  I am awaiting their connection to 
> the net to retrieve their smb.conf and testparm output, but anything to 
> look for specifically would be a boon.

Someone working with a FoxPro database found that they had to
increase the number of attempts to get a byte range lock in
order to make it work correctly. This is an error in the
application but Windows NT/2000/XP (and now Samba) works
around it by retying lock attempts.

The two parameters you could try increasing are :

lock spin count
lock spin time

which are currently set to "lock spin count = 3",
"lock spin time = 10 (usec)". I can't remember the
exact value (although I can look them up) but I think
it was a large increase in the lock spin count to
something like 20 instead of 3 to make the application
work right.

This could be interesting to help correctly set the
default values for these parameters so if you could
let the list know if changing them helps.

Thanks,

	Jeremy.