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Memory mapping a file on a SMB file share causes it to be transferred in its entirety before the call returns. For large files, this causes the application to lock up for a long period of time. How do I fix this?

"Use X instead of SMB" is a valid answer.

Edit: Any application, any file. I'm not trying to solve a specific case. Memory mapping a file is a way of opening it so that it appears to the application as part of the working memory - you access the file as if it's an array.

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Why not to put the file on a local filesystem? – Alex Aug 27 '11 at 10:08
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Which application? Which file? Memory mapped what? Fix what? – mailq Aug 27 '11 at 10:08
So little information. Are you looking for something like this answer? – Steve-o Aug 27 '11 at 16:00
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closed as not a real question by mailq, womble, MDMarra, sysadmin1138♦ Aug 27 '11 at 23:44

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

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This is an artifact of the operating system's implementation of mmap, not anything to do with the network protocol in use (as much as I love to rag on SMB...). SMB is more than capable of reading random chunks out of a file, therefore there's no reason it couldn't read chunks as they're requested. I don't have an SMB server accessable at this moment to verify it, but I do have an NFS server, and I just tried to mmap a 1.7GB file and it returned instantaneously, so at the very least it certainly isn't some inherent limitation in the concept of mmap.

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