[Samba] samba load

[Alfredo Ramos]

I am running samba-3.0.10 on a Solaris 8 box. The server is running as a 
DOMAIN_MEMBER in an Active Directory Domain. It has 8G of memory and 2 
cpus.

The smbd processes are started from inetd.conf.

Lately, the server's load has been staying very high, from 10 - 14 and the 
smbd processes fluctuate between 1200 and 1600. This causes performance to 
suffer and clients start to complain that it takes for ever to login.

What I've noticed is that, the size of the process, as a smbd connection 
starts, has been increasing over the past few days, while the resident 
portion of the process remains at a more or less constant size. Here's a 
portion of the top display:

load averages:  11.45,  10.62,  12.86    15:00:21
1559 processes:1558 sleeping, 1 on cpu

Memory: 8192M real, 2883M free, 4163M swap in use, 9981M swap free


  PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE   TIME    CPU COMMAND
27633 root       4  58    0 1483M   13M sleep   0:16  9.66% smbd
27609 root       4  58    0 1484M   13M sleep   0:19  5.85% smbd
27647 root       4  58    0 1484M   13M sleep   0:06  4.02% smbd
19359 root       4  58    0 1484M   14M sleep   2:16  3.20% smbd
26694 root       4  55    0 1484M   14M sleep   0:26  3.05% smbd
27499 root       4  58    0 1484M   13M sleep   0:09  2.43% smbd
24974 root       4  58    0 1484M   14M sleep   0:16  1.96% smbd
25975 root       4  58    0 1484M   14M sleep   0:52  1.55% smbd
 
When I first noticed this, the "SIZE" was at around 1045M a few days ago.

My question is. What is samba reading into memory with every smbd 
connection? Is it normal behavior for samba to use that much memory. I 
know that is not the resident portion of the process, but still that 
points to resources being consummed.

Thanks;

Al.

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