We have experienced some trouble with samba lately. The servers load going from 5 to 20 causing everything to go very slow, but when I use top to check which process could be the cause of the trouble nothing uses CPU cycles. We have about 90% idle CPU usage, but load from 5-20. When I kill samba (service smb stop) the root-smb process still hangs and when I kill it (kill -9) the load goes back to normal (0.20). Then starting samba again and all is fine - for a couple of days. Any suggestion to what I can check for? I have tried checking the open files, network traffic (pr IP too) but nothing unnormal shows up. We're running samba-3.0.7-2.FC1 updated info: We've tried to add "use sendfile = no" to the smb.conf file without any luck. After about 2 days it seems to halt det server again. I have noticed that the use of swap increases during the 2 days and the problem seems to occur when used swap is about 250 (256?)MB. I tried doing a strace on the process that was left after a shutdown of smb. I got a lot of this: fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7252, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7256, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7256, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7260, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7260, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7264, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7264, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7268, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7268, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_WRLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7272, len=1}, 0xbff 053b0) = 0 fcntl64(5, F_SETLKW64, {type=F_UNLCK, whence=SEEK_SET, start=7272, len=1}, 0xbff Vegard