[Samba] Extremely slow during browsing some directories

[Jonathan Johnson]

David Rankin wrote:

 >>
I am seeing the exact same problem and I can confirm that a reboot of 
Win XP helps the problem temporarily. (this is my laptop so it is 
restarted regularly) It seems something is getting cached or stuck 
somewhere after XP is up and running for a while that is causing the 30 
second delay descending down the directory tree when using the 
"file-open" dialog from MS office applications.
<<

David,

For what it's worth, I've experienced very similar behavior with a 
Novell server in the back end. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about 
Novell, and there isn't a Samba server on this particular network that I 
can use for troubleshooting. I mainly wanted to let you know that it's 
not just a Samba problem, but perhaps some "optimization" that Microsoft 
has used to make sure that their server OS works better. We can always 
suspect that, can't we?

In my situation, browsing works fine with explorer but not in the file 
open dialog in MS Office apps. Just like you experienced.

In regards to Linwei Cheng's original problem, I have to ask, is there a 
machine account in the /etc/passwd file? For one of my customers who has 
a Samba box that authenticates against a true Windows Active Directory 
server, I found that I needed to add local machine accounts to the Linux 
user database (/etc/passwd) in order to get reasonable performance. The 
Samba logs were full of messages whining about user MACHINE$ not 
existing. Now, I might have solved this by adding winbind to the hosts 
entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf, but I didn't think of that. It works now, 
so why fix it?

--Jonathan Johnson
Sutinen Consulting, Inc.
www.sutinen.com