smbd spawns hundreds/thousands of processes
Bug #1359946 reported by
Scott Alfter
This bug affects 1 person
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
samba (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
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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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.