samba digest, Vol 1 #736 - 30 msgs

[Scott Lawson]

>
> Message: 19
> Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 15:17:32 -0800
> To: Martin Rootes <M.J.Rootes at shu.ac.uk>
> Cc: Samba <Samba at lists.samba.org>
> Subject: Re: Severe problem with Samba
> From: jra at samba.org (Jeremy Allison)
>
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 06:08:03PM +0000, Martin Rootes wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> >       we are experiencing severe problems with Samba 2.2.0 (with quota support) running on a
> > dual processor (400MHz) Sun E450 running Solaris 2.7. This is used as a central file server for
> > student diskspace, accessed by approx 1200 PCs running NT 4. Up until recently we
> > experienced some, what we assume to be, loading issues with connections during the middle of
> > the day being slow. However, recently we have been encountering severe problems. Everything
> > seems fine until  midday, then what we start to see is the number of smbd processes going up
> > whilst the number of connections (determined from smbstatus -b) dropping, students with
> > connections starting getting slow responses and no new connections are being made, load on
> > the system skyrockets. stopping samba and restarting seems to cure the problem, but the
> > problem can re-occur. We are in a desperate panic at the moment as the students are all doing
> > assignments and this is seriously affecting their work. We have tried various tweaks to Samba
> > (deadtime, change notify timeout), the tcp stack and have tripled system memory, all to no avail.
> > We also seem to have an issue with keepalives and tcp_nodelay, neither of which seem to work
> > at all, we see the following messages in the log about keepalives:-
>
> We think we've solved these in the latest Samba 2.2.x CVS tree. Unfortunately
> this isn't released as "stable" 2.2.3 code yet (getting close though). If you'd
> like to test this the CVS branch is SAMBA_2_2. It has been confirmed to fix this
> problem on other Solaris and HPUX boxes.
>
> Jeremy.

Martin,

We had similar problems on Solaris 7 with 2.2.0 ourselves. The problem went away upon upgrading to Solaris 8
and 2.2.2. We were experiencing large amounts of processes hanging around in user space eating up memory, these
processes were also getting bigger as well. (Every time smb.conf was modified they got bigger!) Again the only solution
here was to restart samba to try and resolve the problem temporarily. We are running the same hardware as you, Sun
E450 with 4 CPU's, clients are a mix of Windows 95,98,ME and NT and 2000.

Scott.