Samba 2.2.1a On Dual Xeon 866 (1Gb RAM) RedHat Linux 7.1 Server (800 users 300Gb of data)

[Daniel Van Wieren]

Hi,

We currently run a Sun E3000, Solaris 2.6, 2Gb RAM, 3x250MHz CPU, 800 users and 300Gb of data. This runs fine. However, we decided to migrate to a Linux based system as above and this has failed miserably.

Executables are very slow to run from Win9x clients and can be forced to complete execution by kill -9 on the process from Unix, but are OK from WinNT/2K. However, an NFS share of the same Samba share is absolutely OK when connected via NFS to our Solaris server and then reshared via Samba 2.0.6. It appears to be related to 16-bit files which do not display an icon in a Windows Explorer view. However, we were not able to replicate this problem using Samba 2.2.1a on another RedHat 7.1 server we use as a Samba/LPRng print server.

On our E3000 we normally have between 600 and 800 smbd processes running. When we went live on our Linux server these were up to 2000 (and growing) with a load average of 171 (and growing) and kernel CPU usage at 90%+ before we bailed out and went back to our E3000.

The following error was recorded at the height of the problem:

Oct 15 09:06:59 hydra kernel: __alloc_pages: 1-order allocation failed.
Oct 15 09:06:59 hydra kernel: __alloc_pages: 1-order allocation failed.
Oct 15 09:06:59 hydra kernel: __alloc_pages: 1-order allocation failed.
Oct 15 09:07:00 hydra kernel: __alloc_pages: 1-order allocation failed.

It is clear that there may be some tweaks we need to make to the Samba config. If there is a configuration that you would suggest for our set-up then please advise. I am happy to provide any additional information or config details. However, if I should seek assistance in a different forum please point me in the right direction. It is surprisingly difficult to find information on anyone who runs a Samba implementation of this size which I wouldn't have thought was that unusual.

If we are unable to resolve the difficulties then we will be compelled to replace our Linux/Samba file-server environment with a Win2K solution due to time constraints for getting a new system in place to replace the Solaris solution. 

Kind Regards,
========================
Daniel Van Wieren
IST Infrastructure Team
Tait Electronics Ltd
Christchurch
Ph 64-3-3570763
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed