Speed of saving of Word over CIFS

[tbee]

I know that accessing the WebDav interface via Office has problems, so I setup CIFS on Ubuntu 9 and it works great. With one exception; saving from certain Microsoft applications. I did a bunch of tests to illustrate. Saving to Alfresco CIFS from:
- Word: 60 seconds
- samen document from Writer (open office): 3 seconds
- a simple Excel: 2 seconds
- a complex Excel: 6 seconds
- a 21 slide powerpoint: 8 seconds
- a JPG directly into a RAR on the Alfresco CIFS: 2 seconds
- a jpg in Paint.Net; instant
- a jpg in MSPaint; 50 seconds
- a text from Notepad++: instant.
- same text from MSNotepad: 30 seconds
- a sql query from DBVisualizer: instant
- FTP download of a 100k JPG with FileZilla directly to the Alfresco CIFS: instant
- a Adobe Illustrator document: 8 seconds
- print the 21 page powerpoint to a PDF using CutePDF: 3 seconds

For some reason MSWord, MSNotepad and MSPaint are very very slow, but MSExcel and MSPowerpoint are ok. Saving from MSOutlook is slow as well (most likely because it uses MSWord internally).

Is there anyone who has experienced something similar and more importantly; what is causing it and how can I solve it? What is MSWord doing while saving?

[bweiss]

Is there anyone who has experienced something similar and more importantly; what is causing it and how can I solve it? What is MSWord doing while saving?

We have had user complaints of the same issue.  However, for us it is inconsistent.  Sometimes saves will only take a few seconds and other times they take ~15-30 seconds such the user thinks their computer has locked up.  Some testing has shown this is more of an issue in Word 97 vs. Word 2000.  What version are you using?

[tbee]

We're testing it using Office 2003 and Windows Vista, the user uses Office 2010 and Windows 7.
Both environments run Alfresco 3.2 on Ubuntu.

At the moment we have two shared drives setup on each client; one using CIFS via Windows and one using FTP via NetDrive. The FTP is better suited for saving and doesn't have this behavior, the CIFS is better suited for accessing (navigating and reading).

[neil_benn]

Hello,

         Did you ever manage to resolve this issue as I have the same problem.

  thanks.

Regards,

Neil

[tbee]

Same answer: because of this issue (and the client using Office  a lot) we removed Alfresco from the project.

[neil_benn]

Yeah - I'm thinking of the same but never managed to find a decent alternative!  Nuxeo faield on me too and I don;t want to use Sharepoint as I want to store much more data than I am allowed on these services.

[tbee]

We ended up just using a simple shared directory and moved all the other functionality into the applications & the document's metadata (for Windows search).

[neil_benn]

Yeah we thought of doing that but I need strict versioning for auditing purposes and alfresco provides that great.  This problem is just a killer though and I'll look into migrating to nuxeo I think .

[mikeh]

Out of interest, have you guys tried v4.0? Quite a lot of work has gone into the CIFS interface since 3.4.

Thanks,
Mike

[tbee]

No. It was not available at the time this project was running. Too bad though, I would have prefered keeping Alfresco.