[Samba] Samba consumes all resources and hangs machine

[mconnor at reisonline.com]

Sir or Ma'am:

	I have recently installed samba-3.0.2a-1 on my RedHat 9.0, Kernel
2.4.20-8 box. The box has a 300GB RAID5 array, 4GB of memory, and dual
2.4Ghz P4 processors with hyper threading enabled.

	When I copy a massive amount of files (~50GB) to the Samba server
from a Windows 2K client, somewhere during that process (seemingly around 2
hours into the copy each time), my Linux box COMPLETELY locks up. This
behavior is consistently reproducible. When I do not copy files, the box
never locks up. I have hard limits set in /etc/security/limits.conf so if
Samba is consuming all resources, I don't know how. I set a process to
capture the output of "ps" every 5 seconds and the last output it gave
before the box locked up was this (relevant portions only):

root         4  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SWN  Jun02   0:00
[ksoftirqd_CPU0]
root         9  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW   Jun02   0:00 [bdflush]
root         5  0.1  0.0     0    0 ?        RW   Jun02   0:19 [kswapd]
xfs       4913  0.0  0.0  4524 3080 ?        S    Jun02   0:00 [xfs]
root      5636  0.0  0.0  9652 2444 ?        S    00:18   0:00
/usr/sbin/smbd -D
smbguest  5693  6.4  0.1 13948 7132 ?        S    00:20   9:15  \_ [smbd]
root      5638  0.0  0.0  7796 1980 ?        S    00:18   0:00
/usr/sbin/nmbd -D

	The last "uptime" output before the crash was:

02:43:59  up  2:50,  2 users,  load average: 0.60, 0.47, 0.46

	Any thoughts on the matter? Thanks for any help!

Respectfully,

Matthew Connor