[Samba] Poor performance with Mac OS X Panther clients

[ww m-pubsyssamba]

I would strongly suspect that the Mac OS finder is simply hammering the
file server because, in your case, it as to do 10000 seperate read opertions
just to display the folder contents. Try with an NFS share, this would
identify whether the SMB support in either the client or server is
ineffecient or if you just have unrealistic expectations of performance
from this type of configuration.
If you are using an OS X server have you tried connected via Apple Talk
instead? This has native support for resource fork data and may give
better performance,

	thanks Andy.

> I will test the results from both Windows and Mac OS X clients with the
> data hosted on a Windows server to measure the results. From experience,
> I expect that the Mac OS X clients will still perform worse but not to
> the same degree as when the data was hosted on Samba. 

Turns out that we are seeing similar CPU spikes on the server whether
the server is a Windows box of a *nix box running Samba. To me, this
would indicate that this is a problem with the Mac OS X client. Based on
the packet dumps, I would say that the Mac OS X Samba system is doing
the the directory contents lookups in a very inefficient manner. Since
OS X is running a version of Samba... Anyone have any tips? 


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