[Bug 1359946] Re: smbd spawns hundreds/thousands of processes

[Scott Alfter]

I think the recent change that caused this problem was where I told my
router (a WRT54GL running Tomato) to start writing logfiles to a Samba
share.  greyhole --logs reported that the logfile was being held open. I
turned off logging, rebooted the router, stopped Samba, made sure all
its processes were dead (and that lsof no longer reported the logfile as
being held open), and restarted Samba. Where the smbd process count
would've previously gone up at a steady pace with many of them trying to
take 100% CPU, the process count is now staying relatively low (about
equal to the number of shares it's serving up) and the load average is
staying low (currently 0.00).

So now we know what's causing the problem and how to keep it from
happening, but why is it a problem?  Files held open by clients
shouldn't cause this problem.  Transmission, for instance, can keep
downloaded files open for days or weeks at a time, but this only became
a problem when I told my router to start writing logfiles.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1359946

Title:
  smbd spawns hundreds/thousands of processes

Status in “samba” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Sometime in the past week, my server has started spawning hundreds (or
  even thousands) of smbd processes, driving the load average through
  the roof.  Once every minute or so, it appears to start a new one.

  Output from ubuntu-bug is attached.

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