[Samba] Samba 3.5.8 (and 3.5.5) shipped with Solaris 10 keeps crashing when smbd process count hits about 500-600

[Matti Rintala]

Hi,

We are running Samba on Solaris 10 cluster as a HA service. There are two nodes in the cluster and Samba versions are 3.5.8 on other node and 3.5.5 on another. Samba build is one that ships with Solaris 10. We are using Sun (Oracle) LDAP for user account data so passwd and group databases related information is retrieved from there. Authentication is done against Windows 2008 AD.

This Samba service is serving users home directories. Same data is also shared using NFS. We have over 11000 user accounts. During summer this new service was working nicely but when user count has increased we are experiencing severe problems. When smbd process limit hits about 500 Samba just stops responding and we have to restart it. Usually Oracle Solaris Cluster does restart but it fails because one smbd process won't die even with -9 signal. Nothing really crashes and at least for some time mother smbd keeps forking new childs so process count keeps increasing. 

We have opened support case to Oracle and together with them we have speculated that this issue might be caused by naming service and/or LDAP issue. So we disabled nscd but that didn't have any effect. We have also switched hosts' ldap_cachemgr to use more efficient LDAP server without success.

Any ideas what could be wrong or any ideas how to debug the problem, please? We are still continuing investigations with Oracle too.


Matti