Memory usage in Samba 2.0.7

Peter Polkinghorne Peter.Polkinghorne at brunel.ac.uk
Mon Oct 9 15:52:40 GMT 2000


Back when we started with Samba (1.9.18p10) we had a smb.conf file
with all our possible shares on every host (thanks to the wonders of
AMD and NFS this worked).  However it was inefficient for the SMB then
NFS hops, and the large smb.conf - 350 shares.

Basicly Samba is relatively inefficient at allocating memory for
shares and this is done for each connection.

Our solution was to customise (by automation using amd maps) the smb.conf
per host to minimise the number of hsres.  This was a big win.

[sorry for belated reply - a bit behind in reading ...]

Scott Lawson said:
> Lucy,
> That's a big smb.conf file! I wonder if that might be the issue. It
> would be interesting to find out if there are any other people with
> files of that size...
>
> May I ask why you have 1000 shares in one file? I assume that they
> aren't home
> directories but actual seperate shares. (Homes can be addressed with
> just one share entry for thousands of users) I imagine that each copy
> of the smbd daemon keeps a copy of the smb.conf in memory, so I would
> expect that your daemons might be a bit larger than normal. I believe
> that the each daemon has the samba configuration stored in memory and
> that it refreshes that every few minutes, with  a lot of daemons
> running that could account for a large a mount of memory. How samba
> actual stores the configuration in memory could have something to do
> with the daemon size that you are experiencing. One thing you could
> try if you have a spare box to use, copy your binary installation
> across to another similiar system and cut the smb.conf right down to
> just the base configuration and a couple of shares. Then have a look
> at the memory footprint of the daemons, is it still the same?

> Scott.

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| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
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