Re: Poor performance for large software repositories downloading to CIFS shares

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nk...@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 3:50 PM, David Brodbeck <br...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
> On Jul 13, 2010, at 5:50 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>> I've got some colleagues with a rather large Subversion repository
>>> whose trunk includes over 10,000 files and over 500 Meg of actual
>>> content for various reasons. What we're finding is that checking it
>>> out it on a Windows client to a local hard drive takes perhaps 3
>>> minutes. Downloading it to a mounted Windows (CIFS) share takes
>>> roughly half an hour.
>>
>> What's the server on the CIFS side?  If it is Linux/samba, it may be the overhead of making a case sensitive filesystem look case insensitive (consider what has to happen when you create a new file in a large directory and have to check if the name already exists).
>
> This could be a lot of it if a substantial number of files are in one flat subdirectory.  CIFS really, really does not deal with large directories well.  Neither does NFS, but the way Windows handles directories tends to make it worse.

I've tried several CIFS servers, including NetApps, and Samba servers
ranging from 3.3.x to 3.5.2. The CIFS servers are about as good as
they're going to get, based on the performance of a direct copy of a
working copy from one share to another, which only takes a few minutes
for the same working copy.