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Date:      Wed, 10 Jul 2002 23:30:31 -0700
From:      Darren Pilgrim <dmp@pantherdragon.org>
To:        Chad David <davidc@acns.ab.ca>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org, alfred@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: tuning for samba
Message-ID:  <3D2D2607.A5AA1FA6@pantherdragon.org>
References:  <20020710180711.A43342@colnta.acns.ab.ca>

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Chad David wrote:
> 
> A local company has been having issues with samba for some time (it kills
> an e250, and has seriously stressed an e5000) and I've been telling the
> admin (half seriously) that he should just toss it on a PC with FreeBSD.
> Well they finally got tired of hearing FreeBSD this and FreeBSD that and
> asked me to bring a box in if I was so confident... tomorrow morning at
> 9am.  So, I'm building a new box tonight and was wondering if anybody
> has any tried and true tuning parameters for samba on -stable.  They
> currently have ~700 users attached.  The load per user is pretty low
> but just rebooting and handling the reconnects has killed small boxes.
> 
> As a side note, the data being served will be attached to the samba server
> via NFS.

The one thing I've seen kill a box besides the reboot-reconnect blast
is content searches by the Windows Find dialog.  All it takes is one
user on a fast machine and network link doing the Windows equivalent
of "find / -name * -exec grep "foo" \{\} \;" to run you out of file
descriptors in a matter of seconds.

Samba uses a seperate process for each connection, and Windows opens
one connection per share.  Most Windows users only work on one share
at a time, so with two open shares on ~700 machines that means ~1400
connections with roughly half of them idle.  That's a lot of freeable
RAM should you suddenly need it.

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