[Samba] Slow browsing

[Jonathan Johnson]

On 10/17/2006 12:41 PM, sim wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have recently set up an old machine as a linux fileserver (Intel 815E 
> board with 512MB ram and PIII 800mhz). I am running the latest Fedora Core 5 
> with the version of samba 3 that ships with that and am exposing a single 
> share for my software raid (4x400gb PATA seagate drives, running from two 
> siig ATA cards so each drive has its own channel)
>
> I also have a buffalo 1.0tb terastation network storage drive that runs 
> samba configured as raid 5 , though I am not sure of the version of samba it 
> is running, though I believe it is a 2.0 version
>
> My wife also has a G5 mac running the latest OSX version, setup to use samba 
> but it is on a different workgroup.
>
> Everything is hooked up via 100 base wired ethernet.
>
> When browsing from my XP pro desktop the file server computer icon shows up 
> very quickly but when I browse to a share on the machine it takes about 30 
> seconds to display the shares. This behavior continues as I access files on 
> the share.
>
> All the other shares from the terastation and mac etc appear almost 
> immediately.
>
> I ping'ed all my machines from all my other machines and the network speed 
> to and from the server seems the same as to and from the other machines so 
> it doesn't seem to be a network issue to me.
>
> The power went of this morning and that shut down the linkstation and mac. 
> Usually they are always on and so are powered up when the linux server comes 
> up, but that situation was reversed this morning, and the linux server was 
> booted first. I now noticed that there was a delay browsing to the 
> terastation and that the linux shares appeared almost immediately. However 
> the delay was not as bad as the original delay on the linux server (only 
> about 5-10 seconds).
>
> Do multiple instances of samba servers cause browsing issues like that? I am 
> using user level security. Is there something else going on causing the slow 
> browsing?
> If there is some incompatibility with multiple servers how can I rectify it?
>
> Thanks for any help
>
> Simon
Please review the Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide, Chapter 10
"Network Browsing," section "Common Errors," subsection "Browsing of
shares and directories is very slow." Also check out "Invalid Cached
Share References Affect Network Browsing" just below that.

http://us2.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/NetworkBrowsing.html#id2590200

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