[Samba] Samba spawning excessive smbd processes.

[Jeremy Allison]

On Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 06:28:42PM +0100, Marco van Putten wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're running Samba (3.0.28-1.el5_2.1) on a Redhat (5.2) server using  
> winbind to authenticate against a Windows AD.
>
> This all worked fine for a while. But now we have the problem that  
> (some) users coming from Linux clients cause an excessive amount of smbd  
> processes. We had 1 user who had more than 1700 smbd processes all  
> coming from the same client. While on the client side there where only a  
> few cifs processes running.
>
> All these processes are not responding to a normal kill. They have no  
> more connection to the client what so ever and have to be killed with a  
> kill -9.

Attach to these processes using strace -p <pid> and find out what
they're up to. Also try attaching with gdb <attach> command and
get a back trace. Don't forget to load the symbol tables also.

This should give some clue as to what is going on.

Jeremy.