[NCSA-discuss] windows/explore/samba - why so slow?

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

I've been using windows at home and it's all a bit new to 
me.

When I look (explore) from my WinXP laptop to the listings 
on my linux 100Mbyte samba fileserver (with about 5 levels 
of directories), I expect I'm doing an `ls -l` (or 
equivalent), which should be a kilobyte of data at the most. 
But watching the blinking light on the wifi card, it blinks 
for minutes and would appear to be copying Megabytes of data 
(a test copy of a 1M files takes only seconds). For the time 
it takes to list all the files in a directory, `explore` 
would have to be copying all the files, not just listing 
them.

Doing an equivalent `explore` on another windows machine on 
the network (whose directories only go down one level and 
only a Megabyte of files), is much quicker.

Is this just windows, does it have trouble going down 
multiple levels of directories, or do I have something wrong 
with my samba server?

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!