[linux-cifs-client] Re: High Traffic load

[Steve French]

> Recentely I noted this high traffic load over the network.
It would be helpful to isolate whether these are SMB/CIFS requests causing
the load, or something below CIFS (e.g. TCP retransmissions).  If your
cifs module (cifs.ko) was built by your distro with CIFS_STATS enabled on the
client you can see counters for each of the common type of SMB/CIFS requests
that the client can send by doing:
	cat /proc/fs/cifs/Stats
and reset them back to zero (for easier comparison) via
	echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/Stats

It would be helpful to know if reads or writes or opens or transact2
(usually for lookup) were causing the load - from there it should be possible
to work backward to what system call in your application is causing the
excessive load (e.g. via strace).

An alternative way of getting similar information is to simply run wireshark
(ethereal) while the load is high and filter on traffic from this machine
and see what protocol and type of request is so common.  In practice
wireshark is fantastic at this kind of thing (every developer and support
person should learn to know and love it ...) but looking at cifs stats
is even easier in your case and very quick.