[Samba] Performance issue on AIX when deleting files in a directory with a large number of files

[Claus Lund]

Server:
- AIX5.3 with JFS2 file systems
- IBM pSeries 520 (1.9GHz p5+ CPU)
- Samba 3.0.22 (and the same problem exists in 3.0.21a)
- I tested Samba compiled from sources with GCC 4.0.2 and 3.4.3 same result
for both. I also downloaded the AIX binary from
http://us4.samba.org/samba/ftp/Binary_Packages/AIX/ and it has the same
problem as well.

Client:
MS Windows XP SP2


We have an application that creates a large number of files in a single
directory. At peak times the number of files in that directory get up around
150,000. The files are around 10-200KB in size. When I try to delete files
out of that directory then things get really slow ... up to 2-3 seconds per
file ... and the CPU utilization on the server goes up near 100%.
If I delete files out of that directory directly on the box then it goes
very quickly so it seems like this is definitely a Samba issue.

I tried the suggestions on this page:
http://mirrors.uol.com.br/pub/samba/HOWTO/Samba-LargeDirectory-HOWTO

But that didn't make any difference either.

I also put together a Linux test box (1.5GHz P4, Ubuntu Dapper Beta 7, Samba
3.0.22, ext3 file system) and the performance issue is not present on that
platform.

-Claus
____________________________________________
Claus Lund
Systems Developer

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