[Samba] CPU consumption by samba

[Massimiliano Hofer]

Hi,
I'm having strange performance problems with samba and an application written 
with VisualFox Pro.
This application is entirely installed in a Windows share and it has a hystory 
of strange phenomenons.

Initially it ran fast on an old NT server (but that server has been replaced).

It has strange performance problems with Windows 2000 Server: it runs fast 
with some servers and slow with other seemengly identical ones. The slow 
Windows servers show no noticeable load (low CPU usage, low disk usage, low 
network bandwidth, but very high number of packets).

I tried to share this same application with Samba hoping to gain some 
performance, but it runs even slower (twice the loading time the the slowest 
Windows available) and it hogs all the CPU. This last detail particularly 
surprised me.

I attach the samba logs for just 0.5 seconds of high load (log level 5). I 
tried all I could to optimize samba for this kind of load, but nothing yelded 
better results than just the default and I don't know what else to try.
Has anyone had similar problems with applications that try to access massive 
amounts of files (and with massive amounts of errors)?

-- 
Bye,
   Massimiliano Hofer