Very slow over LAN

I have setup Zentyal server (Ubuntu Server 12.04 with Samba4 as Active Directory with ACL) for an animation studio belonging to a friend and they have noticed degraded performance in Storyboard Pro. It was already slow before when they didn’t have a server which managed permissions (ACL) but now with Zentyal and ACL enabled the program has suffered greatly. Loading a large scene can take a few minutes…

The server is pretty powerfull for a standalone Samba4 server. It utilizes 6x 3TB SATA2 in RAID5 on a dedicated Areca controller and pumps out over 100MB/s on the network. Everything from large Photoshop files to Premiere projects are loading very quickly, except Storyboard.

The one thing I notice is that Storyboard seems to write a considerable amount of files. Even just rsyncing the data to the offsite backup system is taking an exceedingly long time to calculate just because the amount of files is so great. The amount of data is not even that much, but it’s the amount of files which really seem to slow everything down…

Is there anything we can do to lower the amount of files?
Or are there tweaks we could perform to speed it up?

Maybe it would be an idea you could look into for future versions if this is not possible at the moment?

It would improve performance greatly if things could be packaged into single larger files (I think, but don’t quote me on that, hard to tell without testing).

I’ve heard that copying from one scene to another is especially slow, sometimes they have to wait 15 minutes…

Actually it is not recommended to work on Storyboard projects directly from an external drive, network storage drive or USB drive due to the number of files being written/modified - there is a danger of the project becoming corrupted and losing data because these storage systems might not be able to keep up. It is better to work on the project while located on the system’s internal hard drive and then zip the project folder for archiving on these other media.