My samba process is exhausting all memory and running out of swap while performing a large file copy from my WindowsXP machine to my FreeBSD samba server. If I completely restart samba it starts off utilizing about 50% of my 100mbit ethernet link and slowly degrades down to below 10%. Then after about 15 minutes it is killed: pid 47755 (smbd), uid 500, was killed: out of swap space I noticed while performing a smaller copy that the server process was growing in size. I observed it when it was already about 800-900MB and watched it grow to larger than 1GB before the copy completed. I'm running FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE from aprox late july with a samba that was built from the ports tree updated about mid september: # $FreeBSD: ports/net/samba3/Makefile,v 1.162 2007/09/18 22:27:57 timur Exp $ PORTVERSION?= 3.0.26a I can provide more information or perform tests if it is helpful.
Ugh, so after I reported this, it is not happening any more. The only change I can think of is I noticed very old smbd and nmbd processes around and I killed them off. Is it possible that having an older server running would interfere with a newer instance in a way to cause this behavior? In any case, I cannot currently reproduce this behavior. The current observed behavior is that my smbd processes are not taking up significant amounts of memory and are operating around 60% of 100MB bandwidth and does not seem to degrade while copying very large files.
Thanks for the report Tim. Samba 3.0 is no longer maintained, please reopen this bug if you are able to reproduce it in more recent Samba releases.