[Samba] Performance tweaking for lots of files

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 04:10:03PM +0200, Jeroen Akershoek wrote:
> Hullo,
> 
> I'm looking for performance-tweaking of our samba server (linux, 
> RHES4-based). Looking around on the internet I found plenty of things 
> that stated 'the usual' things (buffer-sizes, nodelay, logging to a 
> minimum, etc), but nothing that actually seems to work. We usually have 
> directory structures with many thousands (up to 100k or more) of 
> relatively small files (around 10MB each) and whatever I try, it goes 
> pretty damn slow. I'm getting about 1 file every second, which comes 
> down to somewhere between 50 and 100Mbit (and we've got a gigabit network).
> 
> The files are on a StorNext filesystem that usually has no problem 
> delivering 300MB/sec or more, so that shouldn't be a problem. Netperf 
> also has no problems filling the lines, so that works as well.
> 
> Anybody have any suggestions on getting things faster, or at least to 
> check what's going wrong?

You're running into the classic "too many files per directory"
problem with emulating case insensitivity on a POSIX filesystem.

See this post for details on fixing it :

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2005-February/039408.html

It's in the main codebase now, so should apply to your situation.

Jeremy.