[Samba] Is there a maximum number of shares samba can serve?

[Eric Boehm]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 03:03:24PM +0100, Marcello Romani wrote:
>>>>> "Marcello" == Marcello Romani <mromani at ottotecnica.com> writes:

    Marcello> Eric Boehm ha scritto:
    >> I am being asked to determine the feasibility of serving
    >> hundreds (300-400) of directories as individual shares instead
    >> of sharing a single parent directory.

    Marcello> Hi, I found some docs about this smb.conf parameter:

    Marcello> usershare max shares

    Marcello> which specifies the maximum number of shares that the
    Marcello> samba admin will allow non-root users to create via the
    Marcello> command

    Marcello> net usershare add

    Marcello> ( read for example
    Marcello> http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/net.8.html
    Marcello> )

Yes, I saw that but it wasn't much comfort. We don't have users
creating shares in our environment but I understand your reasoning. 

I have a suspicion that the limit was set to a large value on the
premise it would be unlikely that users would ever create that many
shares.

    Marcello> The example value given in the docs for the usershare
    Marcello> max shares parameter is 100, which makes me think that a
    Marcello> samba server should cope with a number of shares in the
    Marcello> hundreds.

    Marcello> I know it's not much, but I HTH nonetheless.

My primary concern is the the number of clients connections would
increase dramatically.

If I have 50 clients with one connection (one share) now, that's 50
connections.

This could increase to 300*50 connections. Granted, not every client
will be active on every share at the same time but I could easily see
that I could go from 1 to 10 connections per client.

I am interested in knowing or at least estimating how Samba might
perform under these conditions.

-- 
Eric M. Boehm                  /"\  ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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