[Samba] Samba and file access latency

[John Goubeaux]

I've recently migrated a handful of shares from Samba ver 2.28  to 
ver 3.3.4 w/ LDAP backend. Both cases are stand alone samba servers.

So all is working well and I have managed to iron out some of the 
kinks, however now my users are complaining about excel files ( on 
the shares) taking too long to open as well as to save.

I did some tests to get some numbers to deal with and in fact see 
that there is a longer latency in opening as well as writing back to 
excel files eg  11sec for a large 7mb .xls file as opposed to 3 sec 
for the same file on the old samba server. I do not however, see a 
big difference with a large 6mb jpeg file opening on the two samba 
servers which leads me to believe that excel has more overhead etc. 
Mind you all things being the same as far as the clients used, 
network only the samba file server versions are on two different 
solaris servers. The new 3.3.4 server is on substantially newer 
hardware as well as faster storage.

I realize this might seem like a trivial matter but I at least wanted 
to see if this longer time is expected. I am suspecting that b/c the 
new server IS enforcing encryption ( where the older one was not) 
that the time increase could be attributed to this fact?

Thanks for any ideas that might help me get a few cranky users off my back !

-john
-- 
John Goubeaux
Systems Administrator
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
UC Santa Barbara
Phelps Hall 3534
805 893-8190