[Samba] Samba performance with large directories

Jeremy Allison jra at samba.org
Fri Jun 24 18:32:19 GMT 2005


On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 10:42:03AM +0200, Tomas Baublys wrote:
> 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...

This may be a filesystem problem - looks like you've got the parameters
correct. Any chance you can test this on a different filesystem than
reiser ? Maybe XFS ?

Jeremy.


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