multiple smbd's ?

[R.Oehler at GDImbH.com]

Hi, List!

(I'm not yet subscribed, please CC to me also)

... I read the archives now and realized that I did not
express my wishes well. I talked about multithreading, but
that's not exactly what I want. Multiple smbd-PROCESSES
(like userspace-NFS-daemon) would solve my problem. 
SAMBA should be able to write to multiple disk-devices 
simultaneously. Even while writes to some of the disks 
are blocking, the writes to other disks should continue.

Now again my Mail:


Recently I ran into a problem which results from the fact that
SAMBA is singlethreaded. I wanted to copy Files simultaneously
from many computers to our SAMBA fileserver. The fileserver
uses a jukebox (changer-device) with virtual devices as storage.
The problem is that the copy performance drops to about zero.
The reason is that when SAMBA blocks at a request for some medium
to be swapped into a free drive then no other copies can be 
served. When the wanted medium is finally availlable (after 15 
seconds of waiting for the picker device to move the medium)
SAMBA does a few kilobytes of read()/write() and then blocks
for another medium (another copy process). So SAMBA is blocking
about 99.9% of the time until all the copies time out.

Since usually much more media are mounted (copied to) than real 
physical drives are availlable, this problem occures quite often.

I had the same Problem when copying by NFS instead of SMB, but
I solved it by using the userlevel-nfs-server with the commandline
arg "numcopies". It spawns several times and from this time on
everything was OK (for NFS).

Is there a possibillity to run SAMBA in a similar, multiple-server-
processes-way, too?


Regards,
        Ralf

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|  Ralf Oehler
|  GDI - Gesellschaft fuer Digitale Informationstechnik mbH
|
|  E-Mail:      R.Oehler at GDImbH.com
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time is a funny concept