samba - May 2008 - samba server maxing out cpu, load up to 10

This is samba 3.0.23c running on RHEL 5.0.  Starting a few months ago,
the server started periodically slowing to a crawl.  The cpu would be
maxed out and top would show the load between 5 and 10 (it's usually way
under 1, like 0.3 to 0.5).

 

Any way to figure out what is causing this?  This is a 3.2 ghz P4 and a
'pgrep smbd' returns 141 processes.  We only have about 300 users who
could be accessing it.  This server also authenticates to a Windows 2000
domain controller.

 

I reboot the server and sometimes it seems to help for a couple days,
and sometimes the load immediately comes back and we just have to wait
till the next day.

 

Thanks for any help,

 

James

> I reboot the server and sometimes it seems to help for a couple days,
and sometimes the
> load immediately comes back and we just have to wait till the next
day.

We used to have a similar problem - but I've not seen it in a long time.

It was always a badly behaved PC and often involved a Publisher document
being stuck open.

Running top, see if one smbd process is hogging the CPU. You should be
able to work that back to a PC using smbstatus, and I think that's where
the problem will be...

Alex

-- 
Alex Harrington - Network Manager, Longhill High School

t: 01273 304086 | e: alex@longhill.org.uk