What??? Possible memory leak in nmbd?

[Eloy A. Paris]

Hi,

today, by lucky chance I realized that nmbd is eating all my memory.

This is a production server running Linux 2.0.33 and Samba 1.9.18p1.

After running for 9 days, nmbd seems to be using 23 MBytes of memory (!!!)
as shown by top (sorted by memory usage):

 8:21am  up 34 days,  7:57h,  1 user,  load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.00
56 processes: 55 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  0.9% user,  3.7% system,  0.0% nice, 95.3% idle

    USER   PID %CPU %MEM  NI   VSZ   RSS  SHRD  TT STAT TIME COMMAND
root      9806  0.0 33.4   0 23564 21152   480  ?  S    0:19 /usr/sbin/nmbd -
proxy    30619  0.0 17.2   0 14408 10912   548  ?  S    1:07 squid -D -s -f /
[snip]

Before nmbd, the Squid Internet Object Cache was the process that
used more memory. That's understandable but I it just impossible for
nmbd to use all that memory.

After I saw the memory requirement of nmbd I restarted the Samba
daemons and ran top again. Here's the output:

  8:32am  up 34 days,  8:08h,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.04, 0.01
58 processes: 56 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 1 stopped
CPU states:  2.7% user,  2.7% system,  0.0% nice, 94.5% idle

    USER   PID %CPU %MEM  NI   VSZ   RSS  SHRD  TT STAT TIME COMMAND
proxy    30619  0.0 17.2   0 14408 10912   548  ?  S    1:07 squid -D -s -f /
[...]
root     11098  0.0  1.0   0  1144   660   548  ?  S    0:00 /usr/sbin/nmbd -
[...]
root     11101  0.0  1.0   0  1280   648   432  ?  S    0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -
root     11100  0.0  0.8   0  1108   560   484  ?  S    0:00 /usr/sbin/nmbd -
[...]

You see? Now nmbd is back to a reasonable amount of used memory
(1144+1108 KBytes).

I have two other Linux boxes running the same version of Samba in
production. I checked them and the amount of memory nmbd is using in
those system is normal. The difference is that the WINS server is the
box with nmbd using a lot of memory.

Any comments? Is it me or there is something really weird going on
here? I'll keep my eyes open to see if the situation continues.

Regards,

E.-

-- 

Eloy A. Paris
Information Technology Department
Rockwell Automation de Venezuela
Telephone: +58-2-9432311 Fax: +58-2-9431645