file descriptors consumed by printing

Richard Sharpe rsharpe at richardsharpe.com
Sat Mar 1 17:19:17 GMT 2003


Hi,

In some recent work that I was doing, I detected that Samba uses a large 
number of file descriptors before it even begins to do any useful work for 
clients. The number is something like 27-29. The number is worse if smbd 
is linked against any shared libs.

On a machine serving 1,000 clients, that means something like 27,000 file 
descriptors are in use across the machine, and MAXFILES needs to be 
increased to large values on some machines.

Something like 5-8 are consumed by the printing system, and a couple seem 
to be sockets that the master smbd has open that don't need to exist after 
it has forked a child etc.

In looking at trying to prevent initializing the print system, and thus 
not consuming file descriptors, if you are not using printing (and some 
Samba users are not), I found that there seems to be no single parameter I 
can key this on, at least not in Samba 2.2.x. There is the 
lp_disable_spoolss (disable spoolss) but that appears not to be enough, 
because there is still the old system.

Should we introduce yet another parameter? Should we modify/change the 
disable spoolss to something like disable printing = all | spoolss | 
old-style?

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]ns.aus.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org, 
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com



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