I have been using Samba as a Windows server replacement for years, both in my shop and most of my clients. Recently I replaced a WNT 4 server at a customer location with a Linux box - Mandrake 10.0 - which is strictly a file server. The machine my client is using to backup his server is a W98 box w/ 350MHz/256MB, an HP Travan tape drive and Stomp Backup My PC V5.0. This backup was taking about 4 hours when the W98 box was backing up NT (NTFS file system) but now doesn't finish overnight. The server only has about 2.5GB of data but a great deal of that is in very small files concentrated in a few subdirectories of one main directory. The server uses software RAID 1 mirroring and Reiserfs file system on two 120GB drives - the shared partition is 102GB. The W98 client sees the file system as NTFS. I tried copying the server contents to three different machines: 1) two other W98 clients with faster, 933MHz CPUs - the job completes in just over an hour using the Windows explorer file manager; 2) using tar with compression and copying from the server to another Linux box (used as an email/web server) running Mandrake 8.2. This job completes in under an hour. I installed the Stomp program on one of these two other W98 machines (933MHz CPU with 196MB) and the backup takes 11 hours and 12 minutes. My conclusion is of course the Stomp program is a problem here, but is there a reason that on the slower W98 box NT would be done in 4 hours and the backup won't even finish overnight from the Linux box? Also is there a setting in Samba which I might use to allow quicker access to the smaller files? Thanks Larry Weldon larry@welcoin.com
On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 01:27:03PM -0400, Larry Weldon wrote:> I have been using Samba as a Windows server replacement for years, both > in my shop and most of my clients. Recently I replaced a WNT 4 server at > a customer location with a Linux box - Mandrake 10.0 - which is strictly > a file server. > > The machine my client is using to backup his server is a W98 box w/ > 350MHz/256MB, an HP Travan tape drive and Stomp Backup My PC V5.0. This > backup was taking about 4 hours when the W98 box was backing up NT (NTFS > file system) but now doesn't finish overnight. The server only has about > 2.5GB of data but a great deal of that is in very small files > concentrated in a few subdirectories of one main directory. The server > uses software RAID 1 mirroring and Reiserfs file system on two 120GB > drives - the shared partition is 102GB. The W98 client sees the file > system as NTFS.Can you tell me how many files are in the directories. This may be the performance problem with large numbers of files, which I'm currently working on. If there are several thousand files per directory you may be able to make this much faster be canonicalising the case of the filenames on the Linux box to upper case, then exporting that part of the filesystem with a share marked as : case sensitive = yes preserve case = no short preserve case = no default case = upper Jeremy.