[Samba] Could Linux load average problem be related to smbfs?

[Keith G. Murphy]

This is more a "has anybody seen this?" question than anything else.

I'm using smbfs version 2.2.3a-12 on 2.4.18 kernel, Debian 3.0.  The 
other day, I had a problem where df got hung in D state because of smbfs 
mounting a share, then the PC exposing the share rebooting.  (This has 
happened with smbfs across several versions).  umount gave "device is 
busy" errors, and I couldn't kill the df processes; I used 'umount -l' 
to work around the problem.

The weird thing is, I noticed less than a day later that the system was 
getting about an 8 load average, with very little actually running.  All 
those df processes were still around of course, still in D state.

Thanks for any comments.