Slow traversal of dirs/files over smb/cifs

[starfoxuser]

Hello there!

First, thank you very much for your awesome program. I've been a happy user
since version 2.3!

I have recently started backing up files from my local C drive into a freenas
server, on a cifs share. Transfer speeds on the network are quite high (about
60 Megs/sec), but the discovery time of the networked files before sync are
amazingly slow! I discover about 200 files per second. For 55,000 files, it
takes about 5 minutes.

The underlying drive is zfs. executing a "find . . > files" on the remote
machine finds all the files in the drive pretty much instantly. However,
"find" doesn't quite emulate ffs' traversal algorithm.

Anyways, I doubt ffs is actually to blame, and this is most probably a
configuration problem on my end. But I also figure you would be the most
informed person that might know why I am getting slow traversal speeds, and
how to fix it. Would you happen to have any idea what is going on?

[Zenju]

Generally FFS's traversal routine is almost completely I/O bound so that there
is basically no room for further optimization in non-cached scenarios.
In order to find out whether the problem is related to FFS you already had the
right idea to compare it against some other tool. However the single most
important rule when doing performance comparisons applies: make sure all tests
start on equal ground. Usually this means that all machines need to be
restarted before each test to prevent buffering effects in all layers of
software and hardware.