OK, I replaced the old rotating 2TB drive with a brand new 2TB PCIe 4x4 NVMe drive (plugged into a PCIe 4 slot). Went to my backup drive and ran 'eaclean -c2 -s *' on it. It removed a good many EA's. Copied the cleaned data on the backup drive onto the new drive via ndpsmb 4.19 to the new drive on the SAMBA 4.11 server. EA support was off on the client, server was default (which I believe is to support EA's). Used 'xcopy D: N: /H /O /T /S /E /R /V' and everything got copied back over via SAMBA in about 30 minutes.
Then on the server I ran 'eaclean -c2 -s *' on the copied data on the shared drive and it removed A LOT of EA's! I didn't think EA's would be copied (because support was off on the client), and even so, I had already cleaned all the files before copying. Maybe I misunderstand what 'EA support' does. Can anyone explain?
Anyway, the real punch line is that now it works with the 4.19 server. SMBCLIENT does not time out, it works. I don't know if it is because the new drive is so much faster, or because 'broken EA's' are gone. Still early, but so far I have not got an out of memory condition, and it is very much faster to display files in the WPS.
Has EA support been changed since 4.11? Maybe something there is slowing things down - like checking EA's - in 4.19 it didn't do in 4.11?
Regards,