[Samba] Vista client / Linux server - high browsing latency

[Jay L. T. Cornwall]

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Hi,

I have the following system set up:

Server: Ubuntu 7.04, Samba 3.0.24,
  http://www.esuna.co.uk/~jay/misc/smb.conf

Client: Vista Ultimate 64-bit, NetBIOS over TCP/IP disabled, LMHOSTS
lookup disabled. Share mapped to drive Z:.

Up until a few days ago this was working fine. Read/write transfer rates
of over 20MB/s onto a RAID-1 array, speedy browsing. But yesterday I
noticed a drop in browsing latency; there's now a short but noticeable
delay before directory listings appear. Cygwin's ls (which I assume was
inefficient to begin with, but quite usable) takes 9 seconds to list a
small directory.

Curiously, *read/write throughput hasn't changed* - it's still >20MB/s.
Latency also seems normal if I reboot into an XP Professional
installation, or access the share from my Vista Business 32-bit laptop
on the same network. The problem briefly seemed to fix itself yesterday
after I tweaked the configuration file a bit, but returned to poor
performance later in the day; possibly after a reboot but I don't recall.

I've upped the log level and can't see any obvious errors in log.smbd or
in log.(host). Observing traffic with tcpdump turns up nothing obvious -
the exchange goes on for longer but the difference in per-packet latency
isn't visible (Samba sure sends a *lot* of packets to list a directory).

Any ideas what I could do to trace this problem?

Thanks,

- --
Jay L. T. Cornwall, http://www.esuna.co.uk/~jay/
PhD Student
Imperial College London
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