[Samba] Re: Why is EXCEL SO SLOW on SAMBA?

[Dragan Krnic]

| I have always experienced VERY SLOW response times 
| on opening an EXCEL sheet ever since I had started 
| to use SAMBA WAY back. I have been hoping that a 
| newer release would fix this one issue but it never 
| seems to happen. Does anyone know what could be the 
| problem? I can open the same Excel sheet on a 
| Novell server and it opens instantly. I have no
| problems with WORD documents. They open just fine.  
| It just seems to be the Office 2000 pro Excel 
| sheets. This slowness occurs on the 2x all the way 
| up to the 3.0 beta 2. I have also tried turning off 
| oplocks but that has no effect. It takes 15 seconds 
| to open an Excel sheet on SAMBA and only a half of a 
| second on Novell.

On my system Excel (OfficeXP) opens a small
spreadsheet (100 KB) just as fast when it is on the 
local disk as when it is on the samba share.

In 15 seconds it can open a 41.4 MB big spreadsheet.
Paradoxically, it only takes 8 seconds to store it
back to samba share after a change.

The same file on a local disk takes a little less than
2 seconds to open but 5 seconds to write back after
a change.

The copy time in both directions is about 5 seconds.
It may explain the longer write-back time.

However the longer opening time consists of a foreplay,
when a void Excel window first appears until it starts
reading the file sequentially - about 8 seconds, and
the loading time - about 7 seconds. The foreplay is
a very amusing ritual if you look at it with filemon
or ethereal.

But if your PC takes 15 seconds for a considerably
smaller spreadsheet, there's something wrong with your
system setup, not necessarily samba.


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