Performance problem with samba/zfs

[Jonathan Belson]

Mel wrote:
> On Monday 16 February 2009 07:56:02 Jonathan Belson wrote:
>> I export a few samba shares from a FreeBSD amd64 server and I've been
>> editing text files on one of the shares via a Windows box.
>>
>> This /usually/ works fine, but occasionally I'll get a pause of several
>> seconds when I save back a modified file.  No errors are generated on the
>> server, but it causes the smbd process takes a few % of available cpu time,
>> according to top.
>>
>> Could this be due to the infamous seekdir/seekdir issue between samba and
>> FreeBSD?  Some of the directories do contain hundreds of files.  This post
>> suggests it has been fixed though: http://www.vnode.ch/fixing_seekdir
>>
>> The server is running -STABLE ('FREEBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE'), as built on
>> 2008/09/08.  The file system is zfs.  I'm using samba 3.0.34,1, built from
>> ports.
> If you can reproduce this behavior using local access or ssh access (taking 
> samba out of the equivalent) I would take it over to freebsd-fs.
> The seekdir is indeed fixed.
> If not, increase verbosity for smbd, maybe it spits out a hint why it is 
> taking so long (smells like locking).

I just moved my work to an exported UFS partition and I've seen the same problem 
appear a couple of times.  It's possibly a little less frequent though.

So with zfs off the hook, it's possible that the problem lies with samba (or 
maybe the editor itself, although I don't remember ever coming across the issue 
before).

Cheers,

--Jon