[Samba] Avoiding constant HDD access

[Reindl Harald]

Am 07.11.18 um 12:07 schrieb Rowland Penny via samba:
> On Wed, 7 Nov 2018 11:44:28 +0100
> Reindl Harald via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> 
>>
>> Am 07.11.18 um 09:54 schrieb Rowland Penny via samba:
>>> On Wed, 7 Nov 2018 05:45:45 +0300
>>> Albert Berger via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm running a Samba server on Raspbian and observing that Samba
>>>> during idle periods is constantly (every minute) writing to HDD
>>>> (maybe doing some journaling?) what causes the HDD to constantly
>>>> spin and never standby:
>>>>
>>>> root at rpi:~# pidstat -dl 20
>>>> Linux 4.4.50-v7+ (localhost) 	11/07/2018
>>>> _armv7l_	(4 CPU) 
>>>> 04:10:08 AM   UID  PID   kB_rd/s   kB_wr/s kB_ccwr/s iodelay
>>>> Command 04:10:28 AM     0  832      0.00      0.20      0.20
>>>> 0  /usr/sbin/smbd -D 
>>>> 04:11:08 AM   UID  PID   kB_rd/s   kB_wr/s kB_ccwr/s iodelay
>>>> Command 04:11:28 AM     0  832      0.00      0.20      0.20
>>>> 0  /usr/sbin/smbd -D 
>>>> 04:12:08 AM   UID  PID   kB_rd/s   kB_wr/s kB_ccwr/s iodelay
>>>> Command 04:12:28 AM     0  832      0.00      0.20      0.20
>>>> 0  /usr/sbin/smbd -D
>>>>
>>>> Is there some way (via configuration setting or maybe recompiling
>>>> with some parameter) to turn off this constant disk io?
>>>>
>>> At first glance it looks like something is trying to write to a
>>> share, but what is unclear from the info provided
>>
>> no, samba all day long writes to /var/lib/samba
> 
> When Samba is idle it doesn't, Samba only writes when it does something.
> 
> I have been running 'pidstat' on my computer for about 10 minutes now,
> Samba is idle and guess what, none of the Samba deamons gets a mention.

well, there are only connected 3 WinXP and 3 Win7 VM's with their
personal folder on the sare, one has open MSIE with a website and all
others doing nothing at all

these VMs are stripped to the bare minimum becaus etheir only purpose is
testing websites, no unused software or services installed or even running

because the system is running on a micro-sd card iwas tempted more than
once move "/var/lib/samba/private/msg.sock/" and
"/var/lib/samba/lock/msg.lock/" in a tmpfs

but that won't solve the issue
 20K -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  20K 2018-11-07 12:16 printer_list.tdb
 16K -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  16K 2018-11-07 12:16 serverid.tdb

[root at nfs:~]$ backup-nfs.sh
sending incremental file list
sending incremental file list
sending incremental file list
sending incremental file list
deleting samba/lock/msg.lock/1041903
deleting samba/private/msg.sock/1041903
samba/lock/gencache_notrans.tdb
        454,656 100%  402.34MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#1, to-chk=36/77)
samba/lock/locking.tdb
        491,520 100%  234.38MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#2, to-chk=34/77)
samba/lock/printer_list.tdb
         20,480 100%    4.88MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#3, to-chk=32/77)
samba/lock/serverid.tdb
         16,384 100%    3.91MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#4, to-chk=31/77)
samba/lock/smbXsrv_open_global.tdb
         36,864 100%    8.79MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#5, to-chk=29/77)
samba/lock/msg.lock/
samba/private/msg.sock/
sending incremental file list