[Samba] Samba memory usage - how big is it?

[Mike Gallamore]

Similar on Solaris, they have a built in utility called pmap:

pmap <pid> gives output just about total virtual memory, ex:
FF3F6000       8K rwx--  /lib/ld.so.1
FF3FA000       8K rwxs-    [ anon ]
FFBE0000     128K rwx--    [ stack ]
  total     29632K

pmap -x <pid> gives extended info ex:
FF3F6000       8       8       8       - rwx--  ld.so.1
FF3FA000       8       8       -       - rwxs-    [ anon ]
FFBE0000     128     128      64       - rwx--    [ stack ]
-------- ------- ------- ------- -------
total Kb   29632   26088    1584       -

We are currently running Samba 3.2.4 on our system. I can't remember  
what our memory footprint was before we upgraded from 3.0.24. That  
said, with the amount of RAM on our system we don't get more than 70%  
RAM use at any time, even while driving 2 tape robots and 30  
filesystem/raid arrays from the box.
On Nov 13, 2008, at 1:44 PM, Volker Lendecke wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 01:34:28PM +0100, Mike Gallamore wrote:
>> How large is large for a smbd process? Does it just use what is
>> available or what? My fileserver at work (32 core sparc T2, with 32GB
>> RAM) currently has 117 smbd processes running each with 29M total,  
>> 24M
>> resident. It looks like my servers processes are more than twice the
>> size as these ones for some reason. Is it just architecture
>> difference, or does samba allocate more space to a process if it has
>> room for it?
>
> Good question. The size of smbd very much depends on what
> the client is actually doing. For example, listing users
> from a DC makes us cache the user list under certain
> circumstances. On Linux those 5MB RES are what I would
> expect. With Samba 3.2 I would expect less, we have done a
> lot of work to reduce the memory footprint for 3.2. 24MB
> resident is certainly very much, although reading the output
> of top sometimes is more of black art than anything else.
> Under Linux, /proc/<pid>/smaps is VERY helpful, not sure if
> Solaris provides a similar feature.
>
> Volker