Hi, A few days ago i started profiling and debugging the KIO SMB slave to figure out why a simple task as listing a directory (in dolphin) is so utterly slow. It's been like that for as long as i remember but never had attempted to debug it before.
Do this for example: Mount a samba network share locally like so: mount -t cifs //path/to/your/share /path/to/your/mount/ -o user=guest,guest -v Now if you browse that folder in dolphin (the cifs mount) you get perfectly fine performance. Listings work rapidly. If you browse to the exact same location using smb://path/to/your/share you're welcomed by notably slower performance. I'm not talking about 0.1 second vs 0.2, but rather numbers like ~1 second for cifs and ~5 seconds for smb://.. You - as a user - will notice that difference. I know, i can just use cifs and be done with it. But i prefer to have a good smb slave so i rather investigate this further. I've tried various things to profile this but i'm stuck.. I did make some network profiles (using wireshark) to inspect the smb network packets.The big difference i see there is that smb:// sends an ACK for everything it receives. CIFS never sends any ACK (that i could find). I've tried putting valgrind over it with callgrind and that turned up one weird behavior in listing a folder. Every single file request is being send through SMBSlave::auth_smbc_get_data which in turn does "if ( !checkCachedAuthentication( info ) )" which is a quite slow call! But disabling that line (you can find it in kio_smb_auth.cpp line 100) doesn't speed up directory listing notable. So while that is slow, that is not the cause nor the fix. Starting a slave in debug mode and attaching a debugger to it also didn't tell me anything useful either. I have no clue how to investigate this issue further. Would anyone (preferably with knowledge of the SMB slave) be kind enough to provide some help or pointers where i can find help to tackle this issue? Cheers, Mark