smbfs small read tuning?

[Charles Swiger]

On Nov 7, 2005, at 10:42 AM, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> I have an application that makes hundreds of thousands of small read 
> ()s (a
> few hundred bytes each time).  If I run it directly on files on an  
> smbfs
> mount, the runtime is on the order of an hour.  If I copy the files  
> to my
> local hard drive first and then run it, the total copy + run time  
> is on the
> order of four minutes.
>
> The mount_smbfs(8) man page doesn't mention anything about tuning  
> and I'm
> not sure where else to look.  Is there a way to enable some kind of
> read-ahead cache or otherwise trade some memory or CPU for a speed  
> boost?

Yes, but most of the tunables are on the server side.  If the server  
is running Samba, look for the client caching tuning option in  
smb.conf ("csc policy") and the various oplocks options.  You want to  
have level-2 oplocks working for best performance...

-- 
-Chuck