Hello,
I work for a production studio in Canada. I have a small problem I thought
I?d submit as it is now affecting our work. First, some background: Our
production server is a Dell Poweredge 2800 (dual-xeon, dual-core) with 3 GB of
ram running Fedora Core 3 (default install, stock Samba: 3.0.8pre1-0.pre1.3).
We have about 60 clients, and often running 200+ smbd processes. The server
is connected to a SUN StorEdge fibre channel array (3 TB, RAID5) where our
database volumes are located. These volumes are shared with Samba, and nothing
else (two shares total).
I am observing increasingly dangerous load averages which is now affecting
our database process. Every time somebody does any kind of ?heavy? operation
on the share (search, flip through 100?s of bitmaps with ACDSee, transfer
large Photoshop .PSD files from one share to another), the load averages go to
the roof (15+) and our database process (tbdbserver, one process only, not
multithreaded) starts slowing down, freezing access to the database. When
idle, our load averages are close to 0. Under load, all 4 reported cores do
rise somewhat (~20% each) in top.
I attempted to upgrade both OS and Samba, with terrifying results: Fedora
Core 5, which comes with a newer version of Samba, was not only worse, but
made problems with some of our network rendering software. We had to get back
to FC3. I have reduced the number of shares to a minimum, have attempted to
isolate the database server process on one core as well as lowering its nice
value, to no effect. The amount of RAM actually used is around 1.5 GB. When
under heavy load, I always trace the guilty samba process back to a
workstation running some heavy file transfer.
Is this Samba behavior normal? If not, is there a version of Samba you would
recommend?
Here is our smb.conf:
[global]
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192
workgroup = FILMSTUDIO
server string = prodserver
load printers = no
security = SHARE
logon path logon drive logon home encrypt passwords = yes
blocking locks = false
level2 oplocks = false
oplocks = false
[usa]
comment = USAnimation binaries
browsable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
path = /usa
follow symlinks = yes
[prod]
comment = Fibre channel array (production)
browsable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
path = /mnt/production
follow symlinks = yes
[fcarray]
comment = Fibre channel array (database)
browsable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
path = /mnt/array
follow symlinks = yes
Here is a top at idle:
top - 09:10:41 up 91 days, 20:10, 2 users, load average: 1.16, 1.14, 1.04
Tasks: 259 total, 1 running, 258 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.8% us, 6.6% sy, 0.0% ni, 63.7% id, 23.5% wa, 0.0% hi, 1.4% si
Mem: 3112960k total, 3080224k used, 32736k free, 1014392k buffers
Swap: 2031608k total, 7712k used, 2023896k free, 991960k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1205 nobody 15 0 11856 3408 9480 S 5.5 0.1 0:00.63 smbd
24083 nobody 15 0 33544 6412 9484 S 4.1 0.2 1:01.38 smbd
24161 nobody 15 0 69548 13m 9484 S 2.8 0.4 16:43.94 smbd
2778 usabatch 16 0 23620 11m 17m S 2.8 0.4 2:19.90 tbdbserver

database server process
27480 nobody 15 0 19504 9568 9480 D 2.8 0.3 4:35.55 smbd
11141 root 15 0 3216 1064 1664 R 2.8 0.0 0:00.64 top
2605 root 15 0 5200 1568 3524 S 1.4 0.1 6:20.13 sshd
20485 nobody 15 0 20460 5520 9484 S 1.4 0.2 0:53.68 smbd
23137 nobody 16 0 12576 3696 9484 S 1.4 0.1 0:08.76 smbd
Dexter