What are my smbd's doing ? (was Re: [Samba] secrets.tdb locking fun!)

[Mac]

Greetings once again,

>	We're still suffering here with odd performance issues on our
>Samba 3.0.24 install here on our big chunky Solaris 9 box.

Still suffering, although we're now running 3.0.25b (krb5 v1.6)


>The user perceived issue is slow performance (whilst browsing in Windows
>Explorer, or opening files from within applications etc.etc.)

Where slow = (apparently) stopped.  Things do complete, but only if huge
patience is applied.


>The obvious symptom on the server is a collection of smbd's at the top
>of the 'top' listing.  4 or 5 or so taking 25% or so of CPU each.

One less obvious symptom is that the number of smbd processes is way in
excess of the number of smb sessions.

ps -ef | grep smbd | wc -l       1440

smbstatus -p | wc -l             101


This is not normal on our system.


Also, at least one client started accumulating TCP connections in the
FIN_WAIT_2 state.  (The connection were to port 445 on the Samba server
in question)

>On one previous occasion, the whole thing seemed to grind to a virtual
>halt, and we suspected (but couldn't prove) that a locking battle over
>(something like) secrets.tdb was to blame.

This still seems to be in there somewhere.  I'm coding tonight an
automated 'gdb bt' of all smbd processes.  We'll run it next time it
happens.


                               Mac
          Assistant Systems Administrator @nibsc.ac.uk
                           mac at nibsc.ac.uk
   Work: +44 1707 641565          Everything else: +44 7956 237670 (anytime)