Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] slow find/directory info
From: Michael M Han (han@windy.ckm.ucsf.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 07 1998 - 13:05:38 EST
Previously...
>[snip]
>The clients are connected via 100Mbit Ethernet and a Bay Networks 8-port
>100baseTX switch. The actual transfer rate is round about 8-9MB/sec (which
>is more than sufficent), but this speed drops down as low as 1MB/sec if I
>either copy a directory full of small files (~5000 files) or just fetch
>the directory information for that particular directory. File Find
>operations also take horribly long until they return a result. Using
>the UNIX commands locally usually takes only a few seconds. I know it's
>never going to be as fast as it is at the console, but there really has
>to be some sort of problem regarding my setup or something. Any ideas what
>I could do to speed these things up?
Ouch. The reason enumerates are so slow is the use of AppleDouble,
which means that there's pretty heavy file I/O to get file metainfo to
report for things like a directory listing (enumerate) or a find.
There's not a lot that I know of that improves this performance.
Unfortunately, you'll generally find this is the case with non-Apple
implementations of AFP servers, like Novell's, where there's nothing
remotely resembling the multi-fork filesystem on Macs, so there's a
*big* performance hit.
I know that asun's working on tweaks to speed things along, but the
real way to improve things, AFAIK, is to run some kind of a caching
setup in afpd to improve enumerates. Ah, taking a look at the source
tarball, indeed, asun's got plans for a database to improve
performance on his TODO list.
_________
mike (han@library.ucsf.edu)
I will not pledge allegiance to Bart
- The collected wisdom of Bart Simpson
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