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

[Brian Henning]

I haven't followed the links that others have provided, so one or more 
of them may mention this:

If Windows isn't actually copying all the files (as one post mentioned 
could be a possibility), it is, depending on your view settings, reading 
each file in order to generate an appropriate thumbnail image or icon. 
It may do this regardless of the view setting; I'm not sure.

~Brian

Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> 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
> 

-- 
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Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
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