samba - Oct 2011 - Samba server slow down after serving more than casual data

Hello,

I am currently running Fedora 15 on an x86_64 system that acts as a 
whole house server for named, dhcp, nfs, nis, htpp, samba, etc

The system is currently running samba-3.5.11-71 with kernel 
2.6.40.6-0.fc15.x86_64.  The system is fully patched as of today. 
However, this issue has existed for at least 2 years and I am at a loss 
to debug it.

I have a simple samba configuration for sharing files to a windows VM on 
another box.

Here is the config:

[global]

workgroup = NERD
server string = Samba Server on NERD
security = user
hosts allow =192.168.1.
log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log
max log size = 50

passdb backend = smbpasswd

dns proxy = no

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = no
writable = yes


This seems to work well for extended periods of time without issues 
until I transfer more than normal (for me) amounts of data like DVD ISOs 
or importing a music collection into itunes.  The direction of the data 
flow doesn't seem to matter. Once a large amount of data has been 
transferred, then all remote access becomes painfully slow. NFS access 
to the unix clients, samba access, even ssh'ing into the server becomes 
painfully slow.  Memory utilization and cpu utilization are low.

Restarting the samba server does not clear the issue.  Only rebooting 
the server clears up the issue.

I don't see any interesting messages in the log files

It seems like the use of samba triggers something on the server that 
brings it to a crawl and affects everything.

I can copy data back and forth using NFS for hours and never see the 
issue unless I use samba.

Any suggestions or help in debugging this issue?

Michael

Michael wrote:

 >
 > It seems like the use of samba triggers something on the server that
 > brings it to a crawl and affects everything.
 >
 > I can copy data back and forth using NFS for hours and never see the
 > issue unless I use samba.

---
	So samba is running the background just fine and hours
later the 'system becomes slow'...

 >
 > Any suggestions or help in debugging this issue?
---
	First, find out what is causing the slowdown.

Is samba eating all of your CPU, is it flooding your network?
Or is it saturating the disk so other processes can't get their I/O]
done in any reasonable time.

	If you have perl5.10 or greater on your system,
I'll pass along a little status prog ... it's *dated*, but still
mostly works.  (a 'new version' has been underconstruction well..
at least since last March, but stalled in June due to other problems).

Will show at a glance your top partitions (though recently under newer
kerns, is showing some '<unknown>' -- haven't tracked it down
-- but then
haven't touched it for almost 5 months...)...
consuming doing I/O, the top processes, and the usage on your network.

It will automatically try to run as root (via sudoing to itslf), upon
running it, so if you don't have sudo setup to allow you to sudo and run
arbitrary commands then you'll have to run the thing as root.

But, obviously, the code is included, you can inspect to see that it
meets your safety -- but it needs root to be able to read all the 
processes I/O stats and find out where the I/O is going...  Runs mostly
by lots of inspections of 'proc'.

There's no built help but while it's running it can take 5 keys:
-+dpq, + & - modify the pause time between updates (dft=7s), 'd' and
'p'
toggle display of devices/processes, q = quit (or control-c!).

I took all the 'use' calls to my local libs and packed em into 1 file,
so it seems to run standalone.

If you find it worthless, buggy or annoying send it to /dev/null...
just that in a situation like this between 'top' and this, I can usually
pin down where my slowness is coming from.  But I haven't looked at this
codes since lst march and not at a derivative of the code since last June,
so any questions you'd have about operation...or bugs...I'd be going in
as
cold as you would in trying to figure them out.



A "WAG"** on my part: ....after a while one or more computers begin 
indexing the drive and hammering it..... using BW and disk.


**-Wild ass Guess

linda






-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: iomon-onefile
URL:
<http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/samba/attachments/20111031/8a5b6213/attachment.ksh>