Hi,
I’m curious about something we heard from a Cisco tech a while back. What he said was that the WAAS caches file content but not directory structure. In order to resolve a request for content the request still goes back to the original file server in order to read the directory entry. We have seen instances in the past where it seemed like directories with a large number of files consistently performed worse (even for small files). We had a situation where a single folder was being used to store all of the images from a document management system for an entire year (20,000+ files). That was completely unusable. Even after we prepositioned most of the current year, in many cases, access to these files would time out completely and fail. This did not happen when the processing was all local. When we broke the folder structure down into months rather than years, the performance of the system was improved 100 times over and we’ve had very few complaints about this system (related to network performance) since we did that.
Have either of you seen anything like this? I admit this was an extreme case of poor folder design on our part. Just wondered if the number of files in the directory seems to have anything to do with poor performance.
Jan Rockstedt
