How do you set up a large scale Alfresco CIFS server?

Question

Alfresco provides a CIFS connector so it can act just a normal file-server in your intranet.

Compared with a "normal" (windows/samba) based fileserver, certain operations can really hurt the system, e.g. listing a folder with a few thousand files using windows explorer. Not quite sure, but I think permission checking is the primary reason for this case. Anyways, now assume you have a big filesystem hierarchy exposed and many users using CIFS, stressing the system, effectively "knocking it down".

What is the suggested approach to scale / improve performance ?

Answer 1

In my experience Windows Explorer is part of the CIFS performance issue. I don't have exact numbers, but I remember working on an instance with roughly 500GB data, mostly composed of small images and a few texts in a not well balanced folder tree, for which listing a folder with a thousand children was taking in Explorer around a minute to display. The same operation was taking around 3s on Chrome browser.

We never had time to investigate the issue thoroughly, but we saw an impressive amount of traffic generated by Explorer due to prefetch of information of the subfolders of the currently open folder.