[Samba] Samba tuning for Linux?

[Shawn Wright]

We encountered a stability issue last week on one of 2.2.8 servers 
running on RedHat 7.1 (2.4.19-13 kernel with SGI XFS patches). It 
appears we exceeded the max files and  kernel setting, which resulted in 
having more than 300 zombie smbd processes that we could not kill 
without a reboot. Increasing the value of 'file-max' in /proc/sys/fs from the 
default of 8192 to 32768 seems to have cured the problem for now.

But I'd like to know if there are some guidelines for tuning samba and 
linux for stability and performance. I've applied most of the tips for Samba 
I think, but am not certain about the linux config. How many of you are 
running Samba 2.2.8 on Linux with 300+ concurrent users? What kinds of 
changes have you made to improve stability? 

Thanks.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Shawn Wright, I.T. Manager
Shawnigan Lake School
http://www.sls.bc.ca
swright at sls.bc.ca