[Samba] EXTERNAL: Re: SAMBA bringing NFS server to a halt

Gaiseric Vandal gaiseric.vandal at gmail.com
Wed Mar 6 07:14:19 MST 2013


A few things aren't clear-

  - Are Solaris and RHEL servers mounting shares from the primary server 
as samba clients or NFS clients?
  - Are people running SVN and Eclipse on Windows or RHEL systems?
   -  Are you using samba to reshare NFS shares?



I run a mixed environment of Windows and Linux clients with Solaris 
servers running samba.     The linux clients use NFS (v4 is now the 
default.)      Some of the things I have found are that
-   It is worth patch solaris to get later version of Samba -  if you 
are using ZFS (not ufs) and you have a complex environment with LDAP and 
domain trusts.    But you really have to test carefully before an upgrade.
-    Do not use samba to reshare NFS or autofs shares.


How are clients checking stuff out from SVN?   Via a nfs file share, 
samba file share, sftp or ssh?


I understand the need to maintain stability with a server OS. But I 
think you do have to plan for an eventual OS upgrade/patch otherwise you 
end up with a system that you can't get support on.

Are you also looking at output of vmstat or iostat  ?        If disk i/o 
gets too high, clients may repeat read/write requests which just causes 
a feedback loop exacerbating the situation.    I have seen this with nfs 
clients.     It is like everyone yelling louder to get heard because 
everyone is yelling.








On 03/06/13 08:47, Simo wrote:
> On 03/06/2013 08:28 AM, Joseph, Matthew (EXP) wrote:
>> Hello JAB,
>>
>> Thank you for taking the time to respond to this in a very helpful 
>> manner... If the SAMBA community does not care about helping someone 
>> with a "wildly out of date server" then they should state that before 
>> letting someone join the mailing list.
>
> Do not ascribe to the whole community the shortcomings of an 
> individuals the volunteers 'his' opinion please.
>
>> This is a production server on a closed LAN which we don't have the 
>> option of upgrading it to RHEL 5.9 or greater in the near future.
>>
>> So with that being said, anyone have any experience with what I am 
>> dealing with?
>
> Unless you have 15000 servers connected the fact you have that many 
> processes indicates a serious issue with the server or at least one of 
> the clients. Samba creates just 1 single process per client and all 
> its requests are served by that process. If you are seeing multiple 
> processes it means the client is opening multiple connections. That is 
> wrong and indicate there is probably a bug with either server 
> processes crashing, becoming unresponsive or both, or the client 
> misbehaving..
>
> You may want to consider trying playing with the following parameters 
> on your samba server:
> - deadtime
> - max connections
> - keepalive
> - reset on zero vc
>
> You may also want to prevent samba from dumping core if that is 
> activated as it could put pressure on disks and the kernel if too many 
> processes core all at once.
>
> HTH,
> Simo.



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