WINS problem discovered and fixed!! browsing speedup of 20X for large networks

Eric Warnke eric at snowmoon.com
Wed Sep 9 01:37:06 GMT 1998


Ok, after several months of pulling my hair out I finally fixed WINS and
browsing at out Univesity.  It ended up being an acutal bug, er bad code
segment.  To explain we have a large number of clients ~1000+ at any one
time over 6 subnets.  Browsing was spuratic at best.  nmbd sucked up %70
of the proccessing power of a sparc 5.  Well after serious investigation
I traced it down to two lines of code in nmbd_winsserver.c.

in function

initiate_wins_processing

...

if(wins_server_subnet->namelist_changed)
  wins_write_database();

...

My first hack worked.  I commented them out.  Processing time went down
to >1% and responce time probably went up by at least 20X.  Browsing
works better than I have ever expected.  Before I did this I had tried
everything, 1.9.18p10, linux boxes as lbm's, and 2.0alpha.

If you have more than 100 clients this is a must have!!!

I'm not a developer, but these changes MUST be re-integrated into the
code.  This will fix amny problems with browsing.  WINS was spending 99%
of it's time writing out it's database to file.  I am currently using
2.0alpha, but I may go back to 1.9.xxx as soon as I know that my patches
will work.

I would like to hear others with large network and how things work after
applying these patches.

Eric Warnke
System Admin, ResNet
University at Albany, NY
eric at snowmoon.com


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