[Samba] Increasing max stat cache

[Indivar Nair]

Hi ...,

We have a Lustre Storage with large directories. Many of these directories
contain thousands of files and we have hundreds of such directories.
Directory Listing on Lustre is very slow, due to the nature of most Parallel
File Systems design. It takes around 4 Secs (during non-peak hours) to list
a 2000 file directory. And during heavy load times, this goes upto 10-11
Secs.

Since all the users access the storage through a Samba gateway, we were
thinking whether Samba could help us solve this problem.

Here are my queries -
1. What is the finite upper limit of 'max_stat_cache' value? Not the
unlimited '0' option.
2. How much cache space does storing a typical stat consume? In other words
I would like to know how much memory will we require to cache obscene
amounts of Stat information?
3. Can we increase the max_stat_cache TTL? Since the files once created,
never ever change, I would like to set this to a very High value.
4. Is there anything else that I should look for, on increasing the
'max_stat_cache' value?

Regards,


Indivar Nair