Opening a project in an IDE / editor over Samba = SLOW

Question

I'm not sure if this is the correct forum to ask this question so I'll probably be told about it, but anyway - I'm connected to the Samba share on my companies development server from my home (where I work now), and when viewing the files through explorer (windows 7) the browsing is relatively quick. However when I open a directory on the Samba drive as a project in an IDE - whether it be Aptana or eTextEditor - browsing the directories in the project panel is unbearably slow.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

We did extensive trials with the source stored on a smb (cifs) mounted disk in the enterprise software company where I work and the conclusion was that it is not possible to tweak this to any acceptable performance, since cifs performance for handling big amounts of small files is so poor.

In our scenario the terminal server using with the IDE was in the same data center as the app servers serving the cifs so the network was comparable performing as local disks.

We also invested some time trying this out with NFS on Windows but the performance was just slightly better there. To compare we set up the same scenario with NFS and Linux and it turned out to rather okay.

The difference between Explorer and a IDE is that Explorer just bothers about a directory/file a time, while you IDE will access all you files allot.

The way to go is probably to go with a VCS and a local install of the IDE at home or a remote desktop solution.