[Samba] processes not closing

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 04:02:12PM -0500, Doug Tucker wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 09:32 -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 09:21:53AM -0500, Doug Tucker wrote:
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > It's not self-healing if you use kill -9, it could never be so.
> > > > 
> > > > Jeremy.
> > > 
> > > Jeremy, well, I gave up and rebooted to one kernel back, and wallah, you
> > > are correct, it fixed the problem.  And, it cleared up some horrible
> > > slowness we had been seeing as well.  For anyone else out there having
> > > this issue, I was running this CenotOS kernel:
> > > 
> > > 2.6.9-78.0.1.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Jul 23 17:30:51 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386
> > > GNU/Linux
> > 
> > Great ! That restores my faith in the way the universe works :-). Glad
> > you solved your problem.
> > 
> > Jeremy.
> 
> Hate to do this, but upon further review....now that it's been running
> for a week, I'm seeing the same issue.  Clients disconnecting and
> leaving a ton of processes in smbstatus.  I can now kill -9 and restart
> the smb process, but restarting is hard to do with users having files
> open all day long.  Any ideas?

kill -9 is never the right thing to do. When clients disconnect,
check the tcp state with netstat. If you see a process id in smbstatus
then check if that process really does exist. If it doesn't then the
next smbd accessor of that file should self clean the record. If the
pid still exists when the client has disconnected the TCP socket
then you need to investigate why - attach to the process with
strace and see what it's doing. This is going to be harder to
debug than most things, but you've got a very unusually behaving
system here.

Jeremy.