[Samba] Samba and large directories

[Tom Dickson]

Manfred Birkhoff manfred.birkhoff at veritas.com

> Hi!
>
> I would like to use samba to share a directory with about 1.5 Mio Files.
> The environment is HP/UX 11.11 on a HP9000 (4 procs, 4GB RAM), vxfs 3.5,
> EMC Symmetrix and samba 2.09.
>
> When I share the directory via samba and access it from a Win2k machine,
> the Windows explorer hangs and smbd spawns about 15 processes that use
> quite much cpu time. After 30 minutes I killed the processes and the
> Windows explorer...
>
> Doing an ls -l on the directory only takes 2 minutes.
>
> Does anybody know how to tune samba to share large directories?
>
> I already increased shared mem size to 20MB and was surprised that
> smbstatus still reportet 1MB (yes, I restartet smbd...)
>
> Can anybody help me?
>
> Manfred
>

What I do with my directory (16,000 files and SMB list times of 3-5
minutes), is run (from UNIX) smbclient //server/share and then do an ls.
This primes some sort of cache, and then a directory listing from windows
takes very little time. I have a cron job set to run the smbclient command
every night.

I wish there was a way to tell smbd to cache the directory listings
manually.

I have a AMD K6.2 450 with 180 GBs on a reiserfs filesystem, with 16,000 mp3
files. Of course, I have samba 2.2.8a, which may be different from 2.09.
Dunno.

Windows takes long to read, for it wants all the information available (file
size, etc.)

Hope this helps.

Tom