CIFS slowdown

[atariq]

We've been going through a departmental testing phase of Alfresco 2.1 (with CIFS and NTLM) here at the office and things have generally been looking good so far.

The way our repository has been setup now is to have the alf_data directory mapped over the network to a larger storage unit. I had made the necessary changes in the custom-repository.properties file to reflect the move and it was done without a problem. People have been using Alfresco now via CIFS and the web client for a week with a generally positive reaction.

There is, however, a somewhat serious issue that we have come across that we are looking to address ASAP. One of the directories in our repository contains approximately 250MB worth of documents (1700+ docs and pdfs). This particular directory takes ages (around 30 seconds to be exact) to load fully each time via CIFS and in the grand scheme of things (considering it's a pretty well-demanded directory for the department) the slowdown is cutting efficiency. What's odd is that the directory listing doesn't seem to be that slow via the web client.

Also, for your information, a versioning aspect has been turned on all directories.

If you have any insight on what could be causing the slowdown, I'll greatly appreciate it! Thank you in advance.

[atariq]

Upon further testing, it appears that the web client is inconsistent in its speed while opening the large directory in question. Sometimes it's fast (but not as fast as opening directories on a shared directory on a file server) and at other times it slows down to a crawl.

Again, thanks in advance for any tips on how to speed things up!

[andy]

Hi

The lucene indexes must be on a local disk. While this will change in the future, it is potentially unsafe for indexing and will give poor performance.


Andy

[atariq]

Thanks for the reply, Andy.

Is it possible to have the indexes on the local disk but the repository content elsewhere? Our reasons for having the repository on a separate server is two fold: easier backups, and better utilization of our SAN to provide much larger disk space.

Thanks, again.

[andy]

Hi

Yes, this is described on the wiki. There are properties in repository.properties.

Andy

[atariq]

I think I've found the documentation on the repository.properties file (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Technical_Tips#Externalising_a_Configuration_2) but I now have a quick question regarding this.

I've noticed that there are two files that refer to the repository properties:

1) …/tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/repository.properties

which contains relative path names to the different components of the repository

and

2) …/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/custom-repository.properties

which obviously contains custom settings for the rep. This is the file that I had edited in order for the repository to be redirected to the secondary server.

My question is: does one of these files override the other? Should one of them be 'commented' out? Or do both of them need to edited?

Much thanks in advance again!

[atariq]

Just to follow up, I edited both the custom-repository.properties and repository.properties files to have the lucene-indexes point to a local location. Of course, this meant that I had to move the lucene-indexes directory from the remote server to the local one accordingly.

After restarting Alfresco, I tried to access the large directory again through CIFS and unfortunately the speed is still the same – around 30 seconds to load every time it is accessed.

Do you think I have to recreate the indexes from scratch by reuploading the docs? While that would be quite inconvenient, if it would work then it would have to be done, I guess.

Otherwise, I'm running out of ideas. Thanks again for any help.

[atariq]

Hi again.

To follow up on this on-going issue, I've tried splitting the lucene indexes from the repository that is sitting on the external fileserver and moved the indexes to the local Alfresco server. This did not result in any noticeable increase in speed for the large directory.

Then, I deleted the lucene-indexes folder on the local server and recreated the indexes by setting the relevant flag in repository.properties from VALIDATE to FULL. After an hour or so, it was successfully completed. Sadly, though, this did not lead to any speeding up of the services either, so we are basically back to square one.

I'm wondering, though, whether an NFS share would be the root cause of this issue? Currently, the setup involves having the repository on an NFS share on a separate fileserver and it was directly after this move that we started seeing a significant slowdown (more specifically a slowdown on the largest directory).

Again, any insights would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

[atariq]

Any thoughts or suggestions on this would still be very much appreciated.

Are there known issues with NFS shares and the Alfresco repository?

[jenglert]

Do you think I have to recreate the indexes from scratch by reuploading the docs? While that would be quite inconvenient, if it would work then it would have to be done, I guess.

You can have the repository automatically reindex files by setting this property in the custom-repository.properties.

index.recovery.mode=FULL

This parameter basically deletes any existing indexes and rebuilds them. It seems like you have probably rebuilt the indexes when moving file systems anyways though.