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

[MICHAEL BROWN]

>>> "Dragan Krnic" <dkrnic at lycos.com> Thursday, July 17, 2003 >>>
| 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.

Thanks for the reply.
I added the "veto oplock files = /*.xls/*.XLS" and that works better.  You are right about the "foreplay" because after I added the veto and
open the very first Excel file on a SAMBA share, it takes 8-10 seconds initially.  Any other Excel file after that will open instantly.  Before I added the "veto oplocks", EVERY file that I opened used to take 8-15 seconds EVERY TIME.  Did you have to add a veto statement within your
config file in order to make Excel happy because that is the only thing that I have found to make things work kinda like they should.