[Samba] Fruit/AAPL behavior

[Ryan Bair]

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for the reply and thank you for your work on vfs_fruit.

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 11:09 AM, Ralph Boehme <rb at sernet.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 10:40:32PM -0500, Ryan Bair wrote:
> > I have a share with approximately 5000 folders in the base directory. The
> > performance on an OS X client is somewhat less than exciting. I compiled
> > the latest Samba 4.3 tarball and enabled fruit per the modules man page,
> > however directory listing performance still takes a few seconds.
>
> sounds reasonable for 5000 elements in a folder. How long does it take
> without fruit?
>

Around 30 seconds.


> > In wireshark I'm still seeing a GetInfo Request for every file and
> > directory which hammers my poor server.
>
> Possibly, but the client should already display the folder content
> after doing the initial find.
>

True, initial listing is _way_ faster with fruit.

I've found that subsequent file operations (such as opening a child
directory) are usually blocked until Finder has finished looking up the
metadata for all the items in the parent. I'm guessing this is because the
users smbd process is stuck spinning at 100% CPU and the new request is
stuck at the back of the queue. I've had a few times where OS X drops the
server connection, presumably because the 2nd operation took too long to
complete.


>
> > I was under the impression the aapl protocol extension was supposed
> > to make these requests unnecessary. Am I misunderstanding the
> > functionality or is something wrong?
>
> Slightly inaccurate. It will still make the requests (the exact
> behaviour depends on OS/Finder version), but should display folder
> content after initial find, because the find response is enriched with
> the Apple relevant metadata (FinderInfo, resource fork lenght,
> effective permissions).
>

Ah, understood. Netatalk still has a decent lead on overall load time and
server impact since the client batches the look ups (40 per request IIRC).

Would it be possible (or sensible) for fruit to ignore Samba's usual case
insensitivity semantics for resource fork look ups? While that would not
reduce the number of requests, it would reduce the cost per request quite
significantly.


>
> -Ralph
>
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