[Samba] Slow performance with lots of files in one directory

Chris Palmer chris.palmer at geneed.com
Thu Jan 9 17:07:02 GMT 2003


Anders Nordby writes:

> I've got performance problems with copying small files over to a Samba
> share in a directory that has lots of small files (10000 to 20000
> files). It takes too long time to copy new files (they drip in at a
> fast pace), and smbd eats a lot of CPU time.

This could be not so much a Samba problem as a Unix kernel problem.
Traditional Unix filesystems (UFS, FFS, ext2, et c.) do not deal well
with very full directories. See Maurice Bach's book *Design of the Unix
Operating System* and M. K. McKusick's *Design and Implementation of the
4.4BSD Operating System*. These are both just great books.

If you are on Linux, try using one of the new filesystems like ReiserFS,
XFS or JFS. Among other abilities, they can handle extremely full
directories better.



-- 
Chris Palmer   Systems Programmer   GeneEd




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