[Samba] poor samba performance with many smaller files

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 03:49:44PM +0200, Peter Bulin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have problem with my samba. I have shared folder which contains many
> smaller files (few MB each), this files are stored on very fast disk array.
> Locally, from that machine I can read this files in parallel with speed
> about 500-1000 MB/s, but when I read them through samba, I get only 50-100
> MB/s on a 10 gigabit network. I tried to find the problem, so I analyzed
> strace logs and found out, that files are open synchronous and it takes
> about 15 ms to open one file, so most of the time is spend with openings of
> files. Now my question is if I can do somethings about that, is there some
> settings which turns on asynchronous open of files?

If you're on Linux then use the module vfs_aio_pthread
and set "aio_pthread:aio open = true"

This makes open(O_CREAT|O_EXCL) calls async on Linux
only (as it allows per-thread credentials).

If it's opening existing files then this module
currently doesn't help (although removal of a
couple of lines of code would make it work).

Are you *sure* it's the open() calls that
take the time ? Or is it file name lookups ?