[Samba] slow backup using W98

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 01:27:03PM -0400, Larry Weldon wrote:
> 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.

Can you tell me how many files are in the directories. This may be the
performance problem with large numbers of files, which I'm currently
working on. If there are several thousand files per directory you may
be able to make this much faster be canonicalising the case of the
filenames on the Linux box to upper case, then exporting that part
of the filesystem with a share marked as :

case sensitive = yes
preserve case = no
short preserve case = no
default case = upper

Jeremy.