unexplained system hangs - possible smbfs issue ??

Garrett Cooper youshi10 at u.washington.edu
Sun Oct 9 18:43:27 PDT 2005


On Oct 9, 2005, at 5:14 PM, Murray Taylor wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a system using smbfs that locks up every few hours.
>
> The system is running a cron job every minute, that opens
> a directory that is actually a smbfs mounted directory on a
> Windows Server 2003 machine. The program reads the directory
> looking for a particular file pattern, opens and processes the file
> then closes and renames the file.
>
> What this means is that the smnfs mounted directory file count
> constantly
> increases.
>
> The hang mentioned is just that... the cron job doesnt run, you cannot
> login on the console (well you can type root and <enter> and thats it,
> no password prompt appears). If there is an open console session,
> a single command can be issued then the console freezes.
> The only recovery is a power cycle.
>
> We have run the programs under a test framework to do a month load
> of files in an hour, and cant hang things, yet the production box
> (which is technically a better machine, but runs the same OS versions
> as the testbed) will hang under 'normal' use every few hours. Its  
> almost
> clock regular, except that it is slowly reducing the time between  
> hangs.
>
> We have just purged the Windows directory, and it seems so far to
> have extended the hang window.
>
> Are there any known issues with smbfs and large directories???
>
> NB We have other processes that use smbfs without the large number of
> files on the Win systems and these have run ok for years.
>
>
> It will hang on both these production versions.
>
> FreeBSD xxxhostnamexxx 4.10-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE #0: Tue  
> May 25
> 22:47:12 GMT 2004
> root at perseus.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
>
> FreeBSD xxxhostnamexxx 4.10-RELEASE-p7 FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE-p7 #3: Thu
> Apr 14 15:34:37 EST 2005
> root at svmysql3.xxxdomainnamexxx:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SVMYSQL3  i386
>
>
> mjt
>
> -- 
> A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> A: Top-posting.
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>
> Murray Taylor
> Bytecraft Systems
> P: +61 3 8710 2555
> F: +61 3 8710 2599
> D: +61 3 9238 4275
> E: mtaylor at bytecraft.com.au

     Those are a lot of files =\... a temporary solution might be to  
compress old log files past a particular date, or use an actual  
database system, but yeah... I could see something odd occurring with  
the FreeBSD machine.
     However, you didn't provide a lot of information about the FBSD  
machine. What are the specs for it, hardware-wise? Just curious.
     Also, what's the approximate amount of files in the directory in  
question?
-Garrett


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