What means Performance counter "cifs_other_ops"

[SANDSTURM77]

Hi all

Does anybody know, what the "cifs_other_ops" performance counter has for a meaning? I understand, cifs_read_ops and cifs_write_ops, but cifs_other_ops doesn't tell me anything. After googling, I found some answers, which means that this other_ops are some metadata operations or something. But I didn'f found an answer satisfying me.

The source of my questions is the circumstance, that I have on a volume a very high count of cifs_other_ops (2000-2500) and just 20-100 cifs_read or cifs_write ops in the same time. Typically, the value of cifs_other_ops begins to rise when user begins with their work in the morning and decreases in the evening, when they leave the workplace.

Does anybody know, what this behavior could be?

thx a lot

[jjeziorny]

Hi Reto,

I'm experience the same in one of our CIFS shares, this is a volume used by the Tridion CMS application, i constaly have around 1000 read_ops and over 10000 other_ops. I'm waiting a response from the application developer on why this is happening but my assumption so far is that being a CMS it spends a lot of time checking all files to see if they have changed in order to decide if it needs to update it's cache or not.

So, whilst I can't answer your question it seems we are on the same boat. I'll keep you posted on our findings. Are you using a CMS application by any chance?

[rvandolson]

You might do a packet capture of the activity (either with a sniffer or pktt) and use something like Wireshark to tell you what's going on.  Not sure if an mtime type request comes in as a "read" or "other", but could be some similar activity as jjeziorny mentions.

[richard_mackerras]

Hi,

I get this. There's got to be a description of what is contained in the categories of "other_ops" "cifs_other_ops" "nfs_other_ops" and san_other_ops" and even "flexcache_other_ops".

We had a complete loss of CIFS on Friday and I'm trying to work out what happened. It looks like a recurrant visitor "cifs.stats.pBlkExhaust:info]: CIFS: All CIFS control blocks for the STANDARD pool are in use." but what are the high peaks of "cifs_other_ops" and are they related?

RM