[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 

>>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.

As a matter of fact I don't use "veto oplock files".

And by "foreplay" I meant what's going on on every
open not just the first time. For that matter, starting
Excell for the first time after a fresh login may take
considerably longer even on a tiny local spreadsheet.

If you're happy with oplock vetos, that's fine. But I
think you do have a bigger problem somewhere. How big
is the file that takes 15 seconds to open from a samba
share and only a snap from a netware share?


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