[CentOS] OT? File order on CentOS/Samba server

Sun Jan 25 01:12:31 UTC 2009
Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at gmail.com>

Oi Miguel,

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 15:24, Miguel Medalha <miguelmedalha at sapo.pt> wrote:
> Thank you for caring to look for and post the code.

No problem! Glad to help.

> At first I became very excited about it. But then I tried it...
>
> It does work. The problem is that it suffers from the same illness as
> runfilex does: it takes forever. The process starts very swiftly but each
> new processed page takes longer and longer until it all slows to a crawl.
> Worse yet, Distiller goes on to use enormous (> 90%) amounts of CPU time.
>
> I just measured the process as folllows, for the same set of files,
> corresponding to a 32 page publication in A3 format:
>
> rundirex: 3m42s
> runfilex: 1h29m54s
> Wikipedia code: 1h14m55s

That is really weird, since it's only sorting a list before starting
the processing, but once the processing is started, it does exactly
the same in both cases (the only difference is that in one case
"filenameforall" is used and in the other case "forall" is used over
an array with the sorted list of files).

Do you have a support contract with Adobe? If you do, I think you
should bring up this issue with them and try to figure out where the
huge performance difference is coming from, since it should not.

> I suppose I will end up creating a FAT32 partition on the server just for
> this purpose.

and:

> I just turned dir_index OFF with tune2fs. Now the directory order is the
> same as the inode order. This makes the order of files predictable and
> in fact turns out to solve my problem.
>
> With dir_index turned OFF on that filesystem, when a copy is made to
> another directory (even from Windows on a Samba share) the
> alphanumeric order is preserved. I will just ask the workstation
> operators to copy the PS files to a new folder when they are all
> ready. Distiller is watching that folder and will process the files in the
> normal way, using the rundirex file.

I don't think turning dir_index off will make the order as predictable
as you want it. It may be a good enough work around for now, but it
might lead to strange problems in the future that you may end up
having to deal with again.

I would really advise you to investigate why when you list the files
in the order you want in the input file it takes so long.

Boa Sorte!
Filipe