Hi,

have you tried to do an 'ls -l' in that directory and measure the
time it took for the command to end successfully?
We once had a user which has had over 30.000 (!) Files in one directory
(also scientists can be crazy, eh ?)
'ls -l' took a long time to return. In the mean time adsm hitted his
default timeout limits and crashed the whole session on this
client. After increasing

*   COMMTimeout
*
*   Specifies the communication timeout value in seconds.
*

and

*   ********************************************************************
*   IDLETimeout
*
*   Specifies the number of minutes that a client session can be idle
*   before its session will be canceled.
*

in dsmserv.opt to much more higher values we succeeded to back up the
filesystem.

Could be the reason for your successes on retry, as the client get
the filesys data from the fast file buffer memory pools instead  of the
slow disk drives.

It was just an idea ... ;-)

Bye,
/dh



--
Detlev Hilberg                                     hilberg AT rz.uni-frankfurt 
DOT de
Detlev Hilberg                                     hilberg AT rz.uni-frankfurt 
DOT de
Hochschulrechenzentrum der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet  Frankfurt/Main
Office phone: +49 69 798-28005,  fax: -28313,  priv. cellular: +49 171 4702196