[KLUG Members] Samba share with lots of files

[Dirk H Bartley]

Bruce Smith wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
Before I try it I'll have to accomplish a couple of things.  First I'll be required to
have a partition to format as reiserfs.  Since I did not think ahead and partition the
only drive in that machine with a little space.  Second; I'll have to patch the kernel for
reiserfs, not terrible but inconvenient.  Third figure out another way to back the system
up since I am backing that machine up via nfs.

I was sort of hoping someone would say something like: Just resort the directory in a
cronjob every night with command resortcommand /path and it should do better.  Oh well.

Dirk