Subject: [netatalk-admins] slow find/directory info

From: Patrick Lenz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 17:16:29 +0100 (CET)

Hi,

I got a netatalk server setup for a customer, hardware/software specs to
follow:

- Dual PII/333
- 128MB RAM
- Adaptec ULTRA2-LVD Controller
- 9GB ULTRA2-LVD Barracuda
- 3C905-TX
- Linux 2.1.130-SMP
- Debian 2.1
- netatalk 1.4b2+asun2.1.1
- (anything missing?)

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?

-- 
   __/\__     
   \ oO /           scoop[ freshmeat crew          ]  
    |/\|     patrick lenz[ topmedia vertriebs gmbh ]

---

From: Michael M Han <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Dec 1998 10:05:38 -0800

Previously...
>[snip]

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 ([email-masked])
I will not pledge allegiance to Bart
 - The collected wisdom of Bart Simpson