[Samba] slow backup using W98

[Larry Weldon]

I have been using Samba as a Windows server replacement for years, both
in my shop and most of my clients. Recently I replaced a WNT 4 server at
a customer location with a Linux box - Mandrake 10.0 - which is strictly
a file server.

The machine my client is using to backup his server is a W98 box w/
350MHz/256MB, an HP Travan tape drive and Stomp Backup My PC V5.0. This
backup was taking about 4 hours when the W98 box was backing up NT (NTFS
file system) but now doesn't finish overnight. The server only has about
2.5GB of data but a great deal of that is in very small files
concentrated in a few subdirectories of one main directory. The server
uses software RAID 1 mirroring and Reiserfs file system on two 120GB
drives - the shared partition is 102GB. The W98 client sees the file
system as NTFS.

I tried copying the server contents to three different machines: 1) two
other W98 clients with faster, 933MHz CPUs - the job completes in just
over an hour using the Windows explorer file manager; 2) using tar with
compression and copying from the server to another Linux box (used as an
email/web server) running Mandrake 8.2. This job completes in under an
hour.

I installed the Stomp program on one of these two other W98 machines
(933MHz CPU with 196MB) and the backup takes 11 hours and 12 minutes.

My conclusion is of course the Stomp program is a problem here, but is
there a reason that on the slower W98 box NT would be done in 4 hours
and the backup won't even finish overnight from the Linux box?

Also is there a setting in Samba which I might use to allow quicker
access to the smaller files?

Thanks

Larry Weldon
larry at welcoin.com