MELE A2000 - Problem memory leak with samba

[marmotte]

Hi,

I've a MELE A2000 box with Archlinux ARM installed (stable version of 09 of june 2014). I've just add samba server on it, configure a share (public and in RW mode -> directory is on an external usb disk which is added to /etc/fstab to automount on startup).

Everything works, I can see the samba server and the share from a linux PC and from a Windows 7 PC, but when I start a file transfert (whatever the direction Server -> PC or PC -> Server), the RAM start to grow and when it reach the available size of RAM, the MELE crash.

I check this behaviour from an ssh session (with top command).

If I force the ram to flush (periodically and before the RAM limit size is reached) during data transfert, I can transfert as many file as I want without problem.

To "flush" the RAM I use this command : # sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Is anyone have the same problem ?
How to fix this ?

Except this, the server work fine and can serve multiusers without problems.

any ideas ?

[WarheadsSE]

Crashing when out of memory isn't exactly unexpected, but it should not be hard crashing like that. However, samba/cifs does eat memory like candy, even in the native Windows stack.

[Geoff]

According to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/cgroups it should be possible to limit the total RAM usage of a group of processes, e.g., the processes associated with samba, so that these processes will swap out before causing problems for other processes. I have never done this, but it might be interesting to learn from your experience, so if you try this, let us know how it went. I realize RAM usage isn't the same thing as i/o buffer allocation, but hey, maybe there's a way to do that too.