[Samba] Poor performance with Mac OS X Panther clients

[Nathan R. Valentine]

Here's my setup: 

        - Single Mac OS X Panther client w/ latest patches.
        - Single Windows NT4 w/ latest SPs client.
        - Debian stable Samba server(2.2.3a-13) w/ custom 2.4.26 kernel.
        Oplocks enabled.
        - Cisco 2950
        - All nodes 100Mb and everything on the same switch.
        - HP DL360 w/ 2.8GHz hyper-threaded processor and 1GB of memory.
        - HP MSA1000 SAN.
        - XFS filesystems w/ ACL support.
        
My client is moving their data over to a fail-over Samba setup backended
with the HP SAN. They have several directories with approx. 5000 to
10000 files. The files were moved into the directories on the new file
server from a Mac OS X client in order to preserve the Mac OS metadata.

Viewing these directories from explorer.exe on the Windows client, from
the Terminal on OSX using ls, and from a Linux laptop using smbclient
and ls is stellar. Very quick. Viewing these directories from within the
OSX Finder causes the smbd process to spike to approx. 45% to 55% and
stay there for approx. 10 seconds or however long it takes the Finder to
render all of the icons for the files in the directory. Scrolling the
Finder while the icons are being rendered causes the CPU to jump again.
Depending on how many screens you scroll through in Finder, you can
cause smbd to jump to 99% and stay there for several minutes. We are
still in pre-deployment but the CPU spike is making the client nervous
about what will happen when we start to load many Mac OS X client onto
the server. 

I'm not an expert on the SMB protocol but I've captured packet dumps
from a fresh share mount and directory view from both the Windows NT4
client and the Mac OS X client and it looks to me like the NT4 client is
doing the directory contents lookups with a single "FIND_FIRST2, \*" and
a corresponding return packet from the server with the listing of the
directory contents whereas the Mac OS X Finder client appears to be
doing a FIND_FIRST2 call for every file, including metadata files, in
the directory. This would seem to be supported by a strace of the smbd
process which shows tons and tons of getdents32 calls. 

My gut says that this is a problem with OSX's Finder and not Samba but,
understandably, my client doesn't care...they just want it fixed. Is
there a known work-around for the performance issue with Mac OS X Finder
clients? Do I need to tweak something on the server? On the client? I've
search the Samba archives and not found much mention of this issue and
I've Googled around for information from Apple's end and drawn a blank
there too.

Thanks ahead of time for any insight that you can provide. 

-- 
Nathan R. Valentine <nathan at nathanvalentine.org>
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