[Samba] Samba performance with large directories

[Tomas Baublys]

Hello,

I have a samba server on OpenPower (SUSE SLES9) and a DS4300 storage
attached.There  is a lot of data (8 TB mp3 files). Some directories
contains more then 250.000 files. The application is a music playbox in a
huge CD shop: you can take a CD hold it under the scanner and after the
barcode is scanned it starts playing the first CD track (for 30 seconds).
All files are exactly 125K in size.

The overall samba performance is very good, but if the source directory
contains more then 150.000 files, performances decreases. Windows
application on the client side asks for all file matching the pattern
1234ABCD.m* the result is 6-20 Tracks per CD. Using old  NT-Server the
performance is constant regardless the source directory size.
Music starts playing after 1 second. Using samba it works good for
directories below 150.000 files (1s) and it takes 4-6 seconds if the
directory contains more then 200.000 files to start playing the first
track. Playing next track starts immediately.

After some research, I found this is exactly the behaviour corrected by
Jeremy Allison in February and included in version 3.0.12. I upgraded to
3.0.14a, but unfortunately the performance did not improved.
I am using reiserfs on the data volume and ext3 for /var.

According to instructions below I am using following options for data
share:

        case sensitive = True
        default case = lower
        preserve case = no
        short preserve case = no

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2005-February/099676.html
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2005-February/099744.html
http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/largefile.html


I would appreciate any hints which may help to resolve this problem...

Best regards,

Tomas Baublys

 IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert (CATE)  pSeries and AIX

 pSeries Technical Sales Support
 EMEA Linux on Power Technical Focus Group
 Systems Sales,  Central Region