Samba V2.0.7-21ssl / Kernel 2.2.16-22enterprise Problem

[John M. Barthol]

Date sent:  8-AUG-2001 09:25:26 

Hi,

We currently have 2 Dell servers running Redhat 7.0 along with Samba
to serve Oracle forms to our campus users.  We have been having what
appears to be a tuning problem.  During high utilization periods we
start having slow response going from form to form.  The servers do
not appear to be swapping or have high cpu usage during this slow
access.  This only get worse until no one can access anything in the
share.  Restarting Samba or rebooting the machine fixes the problem
temporarily.

At first we thought the problem might be related to the number of inodes
we had allocated.  We bumped the inodes up as well as files in /proc/sys/fs
but this seems to have had no effect.  These are currently showing:

file-max:	100000
file-nr:	2730    146     100000
inode-max:	400000
inode-nr:	20100   19

We have about 200-500 concurrent samba users per server at any given time.
During registration periods this may climb as high as 700 per server.  The
maximum number of processes per server is between 124 and 200.  The servers
are Dell Poweredge 1550's Dual PIII-1GHz with 1GB memory.  We are running
Samba V2.0.7-21ssl with Kernel 2.2.16-22enterprise (Redhat 7.0).

Any known issues with Samba or the Kernel that I need to be aware of?
Also what should I look at when we are experiencing these problems other
than the console, cpu/memory utilization and the stuff in /proc/sys/fs?

These problems started once we replace four aging Dell P-II single processor
300Mhz/256M servers with the two listed above.  The old servers were
running Samba V2.0.3-8 with Kernel 2.2.5-15 (Redhat 6.0).

TIA

John


+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| John M. Barthol                          E-mail: JMBARTHOL at UALR.EDU |
| Senior Systems Analyst                   Phone:  1.501.569.8711     |
| Dept. of Computing Services, University of Arkansas at Little Rock  |
| "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same lev- |
| el of thinking we were at when we created them." - Albert Einstein  |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------+