I am using Samba 3.0.0 and Redhat 9. I have a large directory structure that consists of about 5150 files, and about 3.2 GB. When I do an ls, such as: ls dirname | cat -n | tail, I get inconsistent results. The number of files returned might vary by 10. If you have more questions, I'll try to help.
Assuming you are talking about smbfs. We don't maintain the kernel portion of the fs. Sorry.
database cleanup