Runaway smbd processes

For some reason my Mac is being overrun with runaway smbd processes. For example, this morning my computer has been logged into an account for maybe an hour or so, and already there are 40+ smbd processes. Every so often (it does not seem to occur on a regular interval) a new one appears, until well over 100 are running. Each one consumes 0.6-0.7% of my CPU, and eventually both processors are maxxed out and the whole system crawls almost to a halt.

Does anyone know what could be causing this, or how to fix it? Thanks for any guidance or suggestions.

G5 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Mar 24, 2006 6:50 AM

38 replies

Apr 4, 2006 5:07 PM in response to M Prewitt

Just curious, what does the following command return?

netstat -anf inet | grep 445

There should be one line that looks like.

tcp4 0 0 *.445 . LISTEN

M Prewitt Author

Level 1

80 points

Apr 5, 2006 6:48 AM in response to Nils C. Anderson

There should be one line that looks like.

tcp4 0 0 *.445 .
LISTEN

Yes, that is exactly what I get.

M Prewitt Author

Level 1

80 points

Apr 5, 2006 2:39 PM in response to M Prewitt

In the end, I gave up tinkering, and just did a reinstall of OS X. Everything is working as expected again. Thanks for all the tips, I learned quite a bit, and am sure my new setup is better than before.

dsalmon

Level 1

0 points

May 23, 2006 6:59 AM in response to M Prewitt

Has the 10.4.6 code been stable since this post? We're struggling with the same SAMBA problem running on an xServe with 10.3.9 on the computer. We have implemented some of the suggestions listed here but none seem to have solved the problem.

David.

M Prewitt Author

Level 1

80 points

May 23, 2006 7:07 AM in response to dsalmon

Everything is still running smoothly on my system. I've had no more problems with this.

May 23, 2006 3:28 PM in response to dsalmon

In 10.4.6, the problems seem to be in AppleTalk. You might want to check the networking page of the OSX Server forum.

Roger

May 23, 2006 11:30 PM in response to M Prewitt

Emmm, even thought, the topic seems answered, I would sujest you to use the smbstatus CLI (terminal) application to check out who is using every smb PID spawned, you would get an output like this:
<pre>
smbstatus

Samba version 3.0.10
PID Username Group Machine
-------------------------------------------------------

Service pid machine Connected at
-------------------------------------------------------

No locked files
</pre>

Comming from an all Unix background World I cannot think of samba repeatedly failing in such a way (and apple not having issued a fix) but I would rather (sick) hunt down the windows clients of my network ...

cheers

May 31, 2006 2:01 PM in response to dsalmon

Has the 10.4.6 code been stable since this post?
We're struggling with the same SAMBA problem running
on an xServe with 10.3.9 on the computer. We have
implemented some of the suggestions listed here but
none seem to have solved the problem.

Here's something that you might find interesting: I had the same problem start just this evening. The difference between tonight, and other evenings? Tonight, I turned on my Windows XP PC, which is on the same network. I suspect that something odd on the Windows machine is causing masses of multiple connections to the Mac for no very good reason.

If I discover anything more, I'll post...

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Runaway smbd processes