Hi everyone,

I have my MP3 collection on a linux machine running Samba for easy access from my Windows XP machine. There are about 1100 folders in the root directory of the share (artists), then albums/songs under that.

When using Windows XP Explorer to browse the share, it is very slow to open folders. The root level opens in about 5-8 seconds, then an artist folder takes about the same amount of time, but the individual album may take up to 25 seconds to open. Double-clicking on an mp3 file causes at least a 6 second wait for the file to start playing.

The strange thing is that when I browse the shared filesystem using Internet Explorer, the performance is perfect. Every access is sub-second and I can navigate around as fast as I can click. Double clicking on an mp3 causes the file to play instantly.

Why is Explorer so sluggish and IE so fast? I have disabled the shared services checking by removing the registry key on the XP client.

One more reason to despise Windoze (as if I needed another).

There are no errors in my smbd logs, and the load on my server is very light, so I don't think the issue is on the server side. The great performance when browsing the share with IE tells me that the server is performing just fine.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jim