[Samba] Avoiding constant HDD access

[Albert Berger]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 07:18:40PM +0000, Rowland Penny via samba wrote:
> That is what I thought.
>  
> I have had 'pidstat' running on a Unix domain member, Samba
> 4.6.15-Debian, for quite sometime and I got two lines like this:
> 
> 15:13:57        0      3571     -1.00     -1.00     -1.00
> 1  /usr/sbin/winbindd 
> 
> and this twice:
> 
> 11:38:17    10000     27033     -1.00     -1.00     -1.00
> 108  /usr/sbin/smbd -D
> 
> Start time: 10:10:37
> End time:   18:47:37
> 
> I have also run 'pidstat' on a Raspberrypi, Samba 4.5.12-Debian
> and got similar lines to the above, just slightly more often, but no
> where near as often as the OP.
> 
> If it helps, I can set up a standalone server on the rpi tomorrow and
> see what I get.
> 
> Rowland

I wonder does enabling updating file access times during mounting the
file system have something to do with this case? If updating access times
is enabled (as in my case) then even file reading operations will be
causing HDD writes: inodes will be updated with new file access
times. I wrote about this in my previous message, but it went
unnoticed.

/Al