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

[Volker Lendecke]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 11:32:32AM +0300, Matti Rintala wrote:
> 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. 

Not being able to kill a process with -9 is a kernel
problem. You need to find out what the process is doing,
although I'm not sure how to do that under Solaris. Can
truss or some other tool inspect a process that is stuck?

> 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.

Naa, not being able to kill -9 is VERY unlikely to be a LDAP
issue. That's mostly user space, except SUN might have some
door implementation of nss.

Volker

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