[OpenIndiana-discuss] Proposed Samba updates

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-06-10 10:57, Christopher Chan wrote:
> up to 4,000 such processes in a few days. I'm surprised that only I seem

Also, as we admins tend to be responsible for solving business problems
more than software problems (i.e. quick workarounds to restore the
services are in higher favor than scientific analysis and ultimately
real solutions of the problem's roots), I might advise to use ulimit
or "project" settings to limit the amount of processes that can be
spawned by the Samba service, be it from SMF or init-script. Say, when
100 processes are spawned, the quota forbids to spawn more and thrash
the system with extra load doing nothing.

The interesting part would be to get rid of older processes - either by
a regular script, or maybe by some settings which would kill off older
processes in the project if you need to start a new one (no idea if
this functionality is present, such an idea is just reminiscent of the
famous Linux OOM killer). Possibly, there is a setting like in many
networked-service servers, which causes the connection-handling thread
or sub-process to complete only so many connections and quit, and/or
quit after not receiving requests for some time (causing the birth of
new handlers upon request and incoming workload). These tunables are
mostly intended against possible memory leaks - a workaround provided
by software authors to quickly counter the unknown elusive new problem,
just like we like. Again, I am not sure if Samba is among these...

HTH,
//Jim Klimov