[Samba] Excessive disk activity from browse.dat regeneration
Bret Orsburn
borsburn at codonics.com
Wed Aug 27 18:44:01 GMT 2008
Greetings,
I'm trying to track down and eliminate the sources of excessive disk
activity in an idle system that is resulting in premature hard disk failure.
Access time updates to inodes turned out to be the worst culprit,
triggering writes every 35 seconds or so. Mounting filesystems with the
noatime option fixed that problem.
But not too far behind inode updates is the frequent regeneration of the
browse.dat file by nmbd.
My first thought was to move browse.dat to a tmpfs so nmbd could create
the file as often as it likes without chewing up our hard disks. But the
lock directory that contains browse.dat also contains a bunch of other
files and some of them seem to want to be persistent. I started down the
path of spinning a web of symlinks to put everything in a place where it
will be happy. But there seem to be several different lifecycles
represented in this collection of files and making them all happy is
looking trickier than I had hoped.
This seems like the sort of thing that other people would have figured
out by now. I've searched the samba archives and haven't found any
discussions on exactly this point.
Before I dig deeper into the code, could some of you more experienced
Samba hands point me to a work-around for this problem?
Thanks.
I'm using Samba 3.0.0 on Redhat 7.3. (Yes, I know that's very old.)
----
Bret Orsburn
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