[Samba] locking.tdb size

[Christian Kujau]

Hi,

I'm running samba-3.5.6 (Debian/stable, PowerPC) on a small LAN (really 
small, 1 Mac client, 1 Windows client) serving 3 shares (1 ro, 2 rw) to 
both of them and I noticed that /var/run/samba/locking.tdb sometimes grows 
to several megabytes in size.

My /var/run is a tmpfs mountpoint, 10MB in total. locking.tdb is 
currently 4MB in size, sometimes it grew even bigger and one time 
even exceeded 10MB, IIRC. While 10MB are not much, this has been far more 
than needed for years now.

I cannot say when I noticed that locking.tdb grew bigger than usual; 
maybe(!) it started to act like that after the upgrade from Debian/lenny 
to squeeze (samba-3.2.5 to samba-3.5.6), but I cannot say for sure.

I've found older posts with similar topics[0] and in [1] (from 2009) it 
was stated that:

  > 2mb is small, it *will* grow larger than this. Putting these files on 
  > tmpfs is not a good idea.

I keep monitoring the size of my locking.tdb for some time now and most of 
the time its size is about 60 or 200KB. Only sometimes it grows to MB 
ranges. The test in [1] was not able to reproduce the issue, so I still 
don't know what would make locking.tdb growing like this.

Looking into locking.tdb via strings(1) reveals a lot of entries that are 
not active any more, as the client who was accessing these files is no 
longer online. smbstatus -L shows only a few (less than ten) locked files. 
Right now, smbstatus -L shows only 3 locked files, yet locking.tdb is 
still ~4MB and not shrinking.

Does anybody have an idea what to make of this?

Thanks,
Christian.

[0] http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2003-October/075116.html
[1] http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2009-February/146638.html
-- 
BOFH excuse #333:

A plumber is needed, the network drain is clogged