[Samba] update: samba causing high load

[Vegard Hanssen]

We have experienced some trouble with samba lately. The servers load going 
from 5 to 20 causing everything to go very slow, but when I use top to 
check which process could be the cause of the trouble nothing uses CPU 
cycles. We have about 90% idle CPU usage, but load from 5-20.

When I kill samba (service smb stop) the root-smb process still hangs and 
when I kill it (kill -9) the load goes back to normal (0.20). Then starting 
samba again and all is fine - for a couple of days.

Any suggestion to what I can check for? I have tried checking the open 
files, network traffic (pr IP too) but nothing unnormal shows up.

We're running samba-3.0.7-2.FC1

updated info:
We've tried to add "use sendfile = no" to the smb.conf file without any 
luck. After about 2 days it seems to halt det server again. I have noticed 
that the use of swap increases during the 2 days and the problem seems to 
occur when used swap is about 250 (256?)MB. I tried doing a strace on the 
process that was left after a shutdown of smb. I got a lot of this:

fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7252, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7256, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7256, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7260, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7260, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7264, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7264, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7268, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7268, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7272, len=1}, 
0xbff
053b0) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7272, len=1}, 
0xbff


Vegard