>It takes 8 seconds to open my home directory which has 413 files >(including sub-directories, i.e. *.DIR files).
This is not very slow, considering that the hardware you are using is old. This new version is also a LOT faster than earlier versions of Samba on VMS. For me, moving from 2.0.6 to 2.2.7a speed directory listing up by a factor of 5 or more for the first listing of a directory, and better than that for subsequent accesses when nothing has changed. The timings for the limited testing that I did with V2.0.6 vs. V 2.2.7a. Directory 2.0.6 2.2.7a --------- ----- ------ A 36.3 2 B 24 2.7 C 124.7 13.3 Notes: Each time is in seconds and is the average of 3 runs done while the system was lightly loaded, if at all. For 2.2.7a, the first of the three times was anywhere from a bit over 1.1 up to 1.7 times the average - the new cache usually brings the time down a lot for the later accesses. For example, the actual timings of the accesses for directory C were 22, 2, and 16 seconds. Note that "2" in there and compare it to the timings with the old version of 127, 114, and 133 seconds. (There was presumably a cache flush due to the disk having been modified shortly before the 3rd access with the new version. It had to be shortly before because the test for directory B, on the same drive, done immediatly prior to this did not show this increase - it had a time of 1 second for the 3rd access.) Directory A held about 295 files, 50 of which were subdirectories. Directory B held about 225 files, 119 of which were subdirectories. Directory C held about 1176 files, 2 of which were subdirectories. Directory A is on a locally attached disk that is farly fast (on the XP900 that is the Samba server). Directories B and C are on another system in the cluster (coincidentally it is, like your system, a DEC 3000 model 600) and therefore also includes some MSCP serving overhead via that system's 10Mbit/sec connection. The number of subdirectories is important since in addition to getting the data (name, size, and dates at least - I'm not sure what else) on the files in the directory in question, it also checks each of the the subdirectories one at a time for a desktop.ini file (at least - it may check for more; it is also known to try to open a variety of files in the current directory as well). So you should consider that 8 second time in comparison to what it would be if you were using version 2.0.6 - with that older version it would probably take over 2 minutes for your directory listing to show up. > I am testing on loriot: VMS 7.3, Samba 2.2.7a, and MultiNet V4.4 Rev A > on DEC 3000 Model 600 with 384 MB memory. After solving the "Flags =3D > >Claude Marinier, Information Technology The DEC 3000m600 design is about 9 years old. It is a 175MHz Alpha of the EV4 variety - some 2 full generations plus a couple process shrinks behind current Alpha systems (and about to become 3 full generations later this month when the EV7 based systems are officially announced next week). It was the fastest desktop computer available when it came out, but it it quite slow by todays standards. You really should not compare the speed accessing stuff on it to a new PC (if you want to compare a new PC to an Alpha, then to be fair it should be a new Alpha). If you want to compare it to something, you should compare it to a roughly equivalent PC. That would be a plain old Pentium (no number) running at something in the vicinity of 120MHz. Your system has a bigger cache and better I/O than such a PC, but at 120MHz the Pentium had a bit better integer operation performance (and a little worse floating point). The DEC 3000m600 also has 10 Mb/sec ethernet built in and you are most likely using that (I think there was a 10-base100 Turbochannel card that you could get a couple of years after this system came out, but I'm not certain), so that is also limiting compared to the now standard 100Mb/sec interfaces in PCs. I don't think you would be surprised if accessing things on a 120MHz Pentium system was a bit slow. Likewise, it should not surprise you that a roughly 9 year old Alpha system doesn't have very good performance - in fact, it might be surprising that Samba on it is as fast as it is. As for what works and what doesn't... 3 things that I know do not work for me with version 2.2.7a: - I can not use Microsoft Excel's "Save As..." option to save a file to the Samba server. It fails, giving two errors, includig one that suggests that the share may be read-only. I can modify an existing .XLS file, although my brief test probably didn't cause it to need to allocate more space on disk. - I can not create a new Microsoft Excel spreadsheet by right-clicking in Explorer and picking the MS Excel file type off of the context menu's "New" list. This is probably for the same reason as the previous problem, whatever that is. (My current guess, without evidence but with knowledge of problems that v2.0.6 has, is that it is probably related to OLE locking - the way these high byte range lock requests are being handled, however that is, may be failing during the creation of new files.) - There was some 3rd thing that was not related to Excel which I can't remember at the moment. As I recall, one, or possibly both, of the first two things did leave a new empty file in the directory. I think it was using the "New" context menu to try and create the file. As I recall, it was then possible to open this new, poorly named, file in Excel and proceed with using it, but I didn't save any data when I did so I can't be certain it really works properly after that. --- Carl
