Samba and filesystem question

[Yu Meng Chong]

----- "Roger Oberholtzer" <roger at opq.se> wrote:

> Our company-wide file servers recently moved from Novell to Windows
> 2008. When that happened, I noted a big change in speed of CIFS
> access
> from openSUSE 11.2. For example, if a directory has many files
> (perhaps
> > 100), it can take a few seconds before the directory listing
> happens.
> File access is equally slower. For us the change was to the server -
> the
> client remained the same. I am accessing things on openSUSE 11.2,
> where
> I always see the slowness. A colleague using 11.3 does not see this
> delay. Not exactly conclusive info. But that is what I see here.
> 
> What OS are you accessing the CIFS volumes from?


Hi Roger,

I've seen the problem from Windows clients connecting to NAS devices,
but I have tested with Mac clients as well (using AFS). The slow listing
of directory contents was something I saw on an older Synology NAS
(running FreeBSD, if I recall correctly).

I haven't tested with Linux clients accessing a Windows share.

One other thing I noticed is that: for small files, copy operations are
significantly faster for Windows clients connecting to a NAS than
Windows clients connecting to Windows. For larger files (>40MB), file
transfer speeds drop so significantly that it can take hours to transfer
files (!). So, the size of the file does affect the NAS performance.

There was a write-up on the Novell website that explained how different
filesystems are optimized for different workloads. On Linux, ext3 and
older are good for small files, bad for larger files, xfs is good for
large files, not so good for multiple small files, etc. It seems that
only Novell's filesystem, NSS, is good for a wide range of files. The
bad news is, although some sites say that it is now open source, I have
not seen it on anywhere except on Novell's OES. They also mention that
JFS is pretty good, but I had a real shock when i tried to format a
500GB hard disk to JFS and it takes hours!

The strange thing is that very few people talk about this on the
Internet, even on the NAS forums.

pascal chong