[Samba] Re: What makes excel file opening so slow??

[Chan Jason]

Hi Alex,
  Thanks for your reply. Actually I tried the socket option, but no
improvement was archieved. Actually the problem of slowness only shown
on Excel Files, not other file types (I didn't tried that on Words,
but they use excel a lot!).
  However, if I build a site-to-site VPN network, those networks are
situated in Hong Kong (Hong Kong A <--> Hong Kong B), the speed
doesn't necessary a problem to be complain. The speed is quite fast
actually. For a 400k excel file, it just takes around 20~30 seconds to
open, and another 15 seconds to save the file. However if the
site-to-site VPN is crossing the border (Hong Kong A <---> China B),
that was really annoying! It took around 2 minutes to open up a 400k
excel file!! They blame me a lot on them, but I simply can't do
anything.
  When I tried to do a throughput monitor, hey, it seems only used up
some hundred Kbit/second of the bandwidth, however we have around
4Mbps for the internet access in both sides (Hong Kong and China).
However I do agree that the latency causes so much problem.
  Previously another user on the list suggests having temporary excel
file on local disk (instead of the default - having temporary on the
same folder of the orginal excel file that you opened). However I
can't figure out how to set it on Excel.
  If the problem cannot be fixed, I might go to use Remote Desktop
directly - user in China connects to Hong Kong's Windows Server, then
open up any file they like. (I ought to use VNC on the Linux Server in
Hong Kong, however the user are sticked to Windows.. I have no
choice!)

Yours sincerely,
Jason Chan

>From: Alex Satrapa <alex.satrapa at apf.edu.au>
>To: samba at lists.samba.org
>Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2007 09:24:39 +1000
>Subject: Re: [Samba] What makes excel file opening so slow??
>On 01/06/2007, at 03:56 , Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>
>> Speed doesn't matter so much as latency.  Check out some documents on
>> windowing, etc... maybe you can improve the efficiency of your link.
>> http://dsd.lbl.gov/TCP-tuning/tcp-wan-perf.pdf
>
>Note you can also set some socket options for Samba, for example the
>following seem to help for my local installation where people are
>accessing the Samba share from computers all over the University campus:
>
>   socket options = IPTOS_THROUGHPUT SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
>
>>> However if we build a VPN
>>> inside Hong Kong, it takes 10~20 seconds to open a 400k excel file.
>>
>> I don't understand what this means.
>
>He's most likely building up a VPN between two hosts on the local
>network, and accessing the Samba share over that tunnel (eg: laptop -
> > VPN server -> office network).
>
>10-20 seconds to open a 400k file means that there's something else
>going on here. Does the 400k file refer to other files for things
>like lookup tables or pictures (or worse, OLE objects)?
>
>Alex