[Samba] Re: Samba freezes server when writing 50MB MS Word document (sometimes)

[Sebastian Scholz]

Volker Lendecke <Volker.Lendecke <at> SerNet.DE> writes:
> 
> On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 09:14:21AM +0200, Sebastian Scholz wrote:
> > Hi list
> > 
> > for a couple of days we have the problem that our samba pdc server (ubuntu
> > 8.04
> > LTS [kernel 2.6.24-24] with 3.0.28a samba package) freezes sometimes when
> > someone saves a specific word document (about 50MB) from MS Word. It's not
> > always the same person. Saving the document - as nearly any huge MS Office
> > document - takes some time, about one minute (guessed).
> > 
> > First the server gets really slow. Some user programs on clients fail to
> > write.
> > The CPU usage of the smb process of the user writing the document goes up to
> > nearly 100%. After a while it's not possible to log on to the server - even
> > locally. It asks for a password but there won't be a prompt. Sometimes there
> > is
> > nothing on the console/screen. Hitting a button does not change a thing.
> > It's
> > not possible to kill the process. Another thing is that there are a couple
> > of
> > smbd processes for one user (see attached user smbd log).
> 
> If it's not possible to kill smbd, even with -9, this really
> sounds like a kernel problem.
> 
> Look for example at https://bugs.launchpad.net/linux/+bug/254326
> 
> Volker


Hi Volker

thanks for your reply. 

You are right, it sounds more or less like that. The difference is that the
kernel was running for quite a while without any problems and we are using a
different board (Intel server board S3210SHLX with Core2Duo CPU).

Being Saturday today it was possible to install the lasted Ubuntu server kernel
update 8.04.3 (Linux xxxxxx 2.6.24-24-server #1 SMP Tue Jun 30 21:03:25 UTC 2009
i686 GNU/Linux). I tried to reproduce the fail but with just me in the office
and no real traffic it's hard to do so.

Maybe it just helped. I will wait and see.

Regards
Sebastian