CPU at 100% with orphan SMBD processes

[Jeremy Allison]

On Thu, Apr 09, 2015 at 11:04:09AM -0300, Andrew/ wrote:
> I have Samba 3.6.6 running [on a Raspberry Pi B+, although that
> shouldn't matter] and primarily use the shares from a Win-7 [Pro]
> box and it works marvellously, except I keep getting smbd processes
> running using all available CPU and smbd performance drops away to
> appallingly slow speeds.
> 
> All the shares are on a USB SSD drive or a Seagate GoFlex 2TB HDD
> both of which are formatted to ext4.
> 
> I've had up to 16 processes all equally sharing the available CPU.
> When 1 it uses 98% CPU, with two 49% etc. as soon as these orphan
> processes are killed performance returns to acceptable levels but
> additional processes soon seem to be created.
> 
> I've had two new processes created today and all I was doing was
> browsing the file shares.
> 
> The log levels are still at the defaults and nothing seems to be
> written to any logs.
> 
> I've searched and there seem to be a lot of similar problems on WD
> linux based NAS and Synology linux based NAs both of which, I
> assume, are using Samba for file shares.

This is very unlikely to be a real problem on WD or
Synology NAS boxes. They work closely with us on
problems and such a generic issue would have been
found and fixed a long time ago.

> Is this a recognised problem? Is there a solution?

No. See above :-). Having said that 3.6.x is out
of maintenance and I'd recommend an upgrade.

Jeremy.