[Samba] Major troubles but solved by removing the ./var/locks/*.tbl

[Leroy van Logchem]

Hello,

Well today it happend.... our first major troubles using samba. This is 
no complaints but just some questions :-)
Our samba PDC server has been hosting 3 TB of data to our 500+ users 
[Windows NT/XP]  for the last 3 years using samba, no problem.
But today all shares went SLOW; very slow. Also the main smbd kept 
spawning new processes so we had 1600+ running smbd's.... ( while 
normally we avg. 250 ).
It crashed the SUN E3500 cluster twice. After alot of searching I 
decided to rm ./var/locks/*.tbl and YES I was happy again.

q1) Is there any method of keeping the *.tbl files in top condition or 
how to early detect corruption?
q2) What I also would like to mention is that the service latency seems 
alot lower then before the locks cleanup, any ideas on keeping it top notch?

--- Below is just some extra about the enviroment:

Running samba 2.2.5.
The dynamic libaries: ldd ./smbd
libsec.so.1 =>   /usr/lib/libsec.so.1        libsocket.so.1 =>        
/usr/lib/libsocket.so.1
libnsl.so.1 =>   /usr/lib/libnsl.so.1        libdl.so.1 =>    
/usr/lib/libdl.so.1
libc.so.1 =>     /usr/lib/libc.so.1        libmp.so.2 =>    
/usr/lib/libmp.so.2
/usr/platform/SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise/lib/libc_psr.so.1

About 150 file locks any given time: ./smbstatus -L | wc -l   150

CPU states: 13.6% idle, 49.9% user, 36.1% kernel,  0.3% iowait,  0.0% swap
Memory: 3840M real, 568M free, 585M swap in use, 4124M swap free


Thanks for any tips,
Leroy R. van Logchem
www.wldelft.nl