samba - Aug 2006 - Extremely slow and consume a lot of cpu when low disk space

Extremely slow and consume a lot of cpu when low disk space

HI. I got a very strange problem, that Im soon going to go insane over.

First. This is my setup.

I got a fileserver with 6 hardrvies in it. All 300GB.
And every drives is shared with samba.

And the performance from samba is okey. 20-30MB/s over normal PCI gigalan

System drive and one of the data drives are SATA , the rest is PATA.
And reiserfs is run on all of them.

The system is running on Fedora Core 5 - 64bit and using prebuild samba
3.0.23a-1.fc5.1
With kernel 2.6.17-1.2139-FC5 . So Im not running any own builds on this
machine.

Problem is that I got extremely low transfer speed when writing to one of
the samba shares ( like less then 50k/s ) and smbd consumed 95% of all
cpu.

And after trying a lot of think I have found this.

When I have less then 21GB free ( drive is 300GB ) samba starts to behave
strange when writing to the SATA drive.
none of the PATA drives is acting strange if they gets full. And if I copy
stuff from other local drive to the SATA drive, Everything is fine. So is
just when data is written by samba. Writing to the drive via NFS work
fine.
And everything works fine until the drive reaches 94% full. Then it start
to be extremely slow.

I tried setting back samba config to default options, but nothing helps.
I tried turning off and killing everything else running on the machine.
But no luck.

This happens for both Windows and Linux clients.

ANY help I can receive with this is very much appreciated.

-Matt