[Samba] Long pauses.

[Thomas Mercer-Hursh, Ph.D.]

I have an environment consisting of:
* Primary Workstation running Win2KPro
* Secondary Workstation runing WinNTSP6a
* Local Win2K Advanced Server
* Local Solaris 8 system with Samba 2.0.7
* Remote HP-UX system at Site A with Samba 1.9.18p10 connected via VPN
* Remote Unixware system at Site B with Vison(?) file sharing connected via VPN
* Three remote Win2K server boxes at Site C connected via VPN
* Remote Linux, PC, and Mac on local network at Site D which access the 
Solaris box over VPN

On my workstation, I have SMB mounts to all of the local systems and to 
sites A, B, and D more or less permanently set.

In using PowerDesk (an Explorer alternative, but the same behavior seems to 
occur with the standard Explorer), I periodically experience very long 
pauses in two situations.  One is in moving focus to the PowerDesk window, 
which I presume triggers a refresh.  This is sporadic and unpredictable, 
often completing very quickly, but occasionally taking a minute or more.  I 
believe that all of the long ones are when the current directory in the 
window is a remote one, but once this pause has started, all PowerDesk 
windows are likely to be frozen until the first one completes, as is any 
file dialog in another application.

I also have sporadic cases where double-clicking on a file name takes 30-60 
seconds or more to bring up the application whereas normally it is more or 
less instantaneous.

The most specific traceable behavior is that if one has a PowerDesk window 
open on the Solaris box and is scrolling through the directories, when the 
directory /net comes into view, there is a very long pause and a full 
refresh of the window, often with a partial refresh, pause, then completion 
of refresh.  This is highly consistent.  The /net directory is empty.

All local systems are finding each other and the remote systems via host 
file entries with no DHCP or local DNS enabled.  The physical connection to 
the remote systems is over a 1536/328 DSL which typically benchmarks at 
significant multiples of those numbers.

Any idea of what to try?





=========================================================================
Thomas Mercer-Hursh, Ph.D.                   email: thomas at cintegrity.com
Computing Integrity, Inc.                    sales: 510-233-9329
550 Casey Drive                            support: 510-233-9327
Point Richmond, CA 94801-3751                  fax: 510-233-6950