Time-critical problem at Sun: exploding smbd memory usage

Keith Farrar farrar at parc.xerox.com
Mon Aug 20 22:19:23 GMT 2001


It's not just the number of printers, it's the total number of shares. We
have no printers defined, but lots of disk shares (roughly 900 on one box
and 1500 on a second host). The servers are Sun E450s, but the same type
of growth pattern occurs on Linux (redhat 7.1 x86).

The smbd processes start up at 6 MB each, then grow until killed by
process limits (currently 20 MB). Max observed growth is 115 MB... within
an hour.

The growth was much slower under 2.0.7, but happens quickly under 2.0.10+
and 2.2 .

It's not too hard to test: create an smb.conf file with 2000 static shares
(squirt it out with a script & reuse the same directory path). Then watch
the memory growth. Someone with familiarity with the code, access to a
memory leak finder, and a good debugging environment should take a look at
this (i.e. not me :).


	-kaf


> Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 12:18:17 PDT
> From: David Collier-Brown <davecb at canada.sun.com>
> Reply-To: David.Collier-Brown at sun.com
> To: Gerald Carter <gcarter at valinux.com>
> Cc: Kris Desjardins <kris_desjardins at hotmail.com>,
>      David.Collier-Brown at sun.com, Jeremy Allison <jeremy at valinux.com>,
>      tonys at aus.sun.com, craig at aus.sun.com, allenw at sun.com,
>      samba-technical at samba.org
> Subject: Re: Time-critical problem at Sun: exploding smbd memory usage
>
> Gerald Carter wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Kris Desjardins wrote:
> >
> > > We ran samba 2.0.7 on Solaris 7 and had the size reach 28MB per
> > > process (200+ processes) before I had to kill -9 the parent and let
> > > the children eventually timeout and die.  I upgraded to 2.0.10 and
> > > applied the patch below from a previous discussion but had no apparent
> > > effect, the processes are 10MB now and growing.
> >
> > Can you track this down to either printing or file sharing?
>
> 	Hmmn, good thought...
>
> 	This look suspicious, we have a whole whack
> 	of printers! 294 of them????
>
> 	I remember some printer issues in 2.0, and
> 	the amount of space they tale, I wonder if this
> 	is what's biting us today...
>
> --dave
>

-- 
| Keith Farrar | Xerox PARC CSNS | Palo Alto, CA | 650-812-4292	|
| DOMAIN:  farrar at parc.xerox.com |				|





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