Eric Warnke
1998-Sep-09 01:37 UTC
WINS problem discovered and fixed!! browsing speedup of 20X for large networks
Ok, after several months of pulling my hair out I finally fixed WINS and browsing at out Univesity. It ended up being an acutal bug, er bad code segment. To explain we have a large number of clients ~1000+ at any one time over 6 subnets. Browsing was spuratic at best. nmbd sucked up %70 of the proccessing power of a sparc 5. Well after serious investigation I traced it down to two lines of code in nmbd_winsserver.c. in function initiate_wins_processing ... if(wins_server_subnet->namelist_changed) wins_write_database(); ... My first hack worked. I commented them out. Processing time went down to >1% and responce time probably went up by at least 20X. Browsing works better than I have ever expected. Before I did this I had tried everything, 1.9.18p10, linux boxes as lbm's, and 2.0alpha. If you have more than 100 clients this is a must have!!! I'm not a developer, but these changes MUST be re-integrated into the code. This will fix amny problems with browsing. WINS was spending 99% of it's time writing out it's database to file. I am currently using 2.0alpha, but I may go back to 1.9.xxx as soon as I know that my patches will work. I would like to hear others with large network and how things work after applying these patches. Eric Warnke System Admin, ResNet University at Albany, NY eric@snowmoon.com
Eric Warnke wrote:> > Ok, after several months of pulling my hair out I finally fixed WINS and > browsing at out Univesity. It ended up being an acutal bug, er bad code > segment. To explain we have a large number of clients ~1000+ at any one > time over 6 subnets. Browsing was spuratic at best. nmbd sucked up %70 > of the proccessing power of a sparc 5. Well after serious investigation > I traced it down to two lines of code in nmbd_winsserver.c. > [snip] > I would like to hear others with large network and how things work after > applying these patches.I like the sound of this but have held off 1.9.18 because of confusion about WINS. Perhaps someone can enlighten me? We have 1000+ win95 boxes on lots of subnets. We have a backbone of Solaris 2.6 boxes acting as servers and routers. Each win95 box can only see (directly) the server at the head of the subnet. I have previously had each of these servers acting as WINS server for all the machines on the subnets off it. The 1.9.18 docs state to only have one WINS server on a "network". I don't want to have only one WINS server for 1000+ machines! My question is: Do I go 1.9.18 with each server as a WINS server for their clients or will this cause lots of fighting over the backbone the servers are connected to? One other question I have is that I've used myserver 0.0.0.0 in the lmhosts of each server so that when a client asks for \\myserver is gets the nearest server. I wanted this because our students carry their roving profiles and go use another server with all the same software on it. I want them to get the software from the nearest server not the server they used last. When I first tried the 1.9.18 line this appeared broken - is it fixed now? Thanks for any and all help, Martin -- Martin Sapsed Tel: +44 (0)1248 382409 Computing Lab Fax: +44 (0)1248 383826 University of Wales, Bangor m.sapsed@bangor.ac.uk North Wales, LL57 2DG Unexpected Application Error: (A)bort, (R)etry, (G)et a beer.