[KLUG Members] Samba share with lots of files

[Bruce Smith]

> I moved a directory from a 98 host to a samba share.  It is a directory that has 26050
> files and is 889MB in size.  It is a collection of scanned images.  The filesystem is
> ext2.  The issue I would like to solve is that it takes about 45 seconds for the list of
> files to appear in nethood when seeking the list of files.  Is there a way to reduce this
> time without sectioning off these files onto other directories?  Would this be improved if
> I used reisrfs?  Is it that the filesystem needs to have the files stored sorted in the
> correct order?  This is frustrating because when the application being used accesses the
> files on it's own fat32 hard drive it takes only a couple of seconds.  I would much prefer
> to keep these files on the samba server if I could get better performance getting the list
> of files on the directory.

ReiserFS handles large quantities of files in a directory much better
than ext2.

Although I've never tried a ReiserFS partition with Samba, I don't know
why it wouldn't work.  I don't think it should suffer the same problems
that ReiserFS has with NFS (at least I never heard of such a thing).
Worth a try IMO.

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Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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