[Samba] Slow samba performance when writing many files into single directory

[Jan Brychta]

Hello,
I met with this problem - we use a groupware app on Win PCs that stores its 
data on samba share. The app uses many directories with large amount of small 
files (emails) in each. App performance is teribly slow - compared with data 
stored on netware share that we were using succesfully for many years. The app 
is unsuable now.
I tried to simulate with these results:
1. ftp access read/write of anything is ok
2. samba reading and writing of big files (250MB) is ok
3. samba reading of 3000 small files (total 100MB) in one directory is ok
4. samba writing of 3000 small files (total 100MB) into one directory is POOR
5. samba writing of the same 3000 files splitted into 15 directories is better 
but stil slow.

I think it is related to case (in)sensitivity. I have no chance to change app 
behaviour so I need to tune samba settings.

It is SLES 8, kernel k_smp 2.4.21-241, samba 2.2.8a
It is independent on filesystem - tried with very similar results on ext3, 
reiser, xfs.

Thanks.