Considerations for SMB clients

Recommendations to consider before you mount SMB share on Linux® systems.

Linux systems can mount SMB shares from protocol nodes. For more information, see your Linux distribution documentation and the mount.cifs man page. Workloads running on Linux SMB clients that often query stat() metadata can run into performance limitations. The performance limitation is due to the increase in processor usage as a result of the high number of metadata queries in the SMB protocol and the IBM Storage Scale SMB implementation.

The Linux SMB mount offers the "actimeo" mount option (see "mount.cifs" man page) for metadata caching on the Linux SMB client. The "actimeo" mount option reduces the metadata queries to the IBM Storage Scale SMB server. For workloads with a high number of metadata queries, you can set this parameter to improve the overall performance.