CPU 100% - smbd Process

Hi all,

I have a big problem, 100% of the CPU is used by the “smbd” process, I don’t know what this process is, and if we can do something, because it takes so much time to copy one file from my PC to WD My Cloud EX2 via WD Smartware.

Can anybody help me ?

Thanks in advance.

It is the Samba daemon…that is critical to access files and shares on your EX2 via Windows explorer.

Can we do something ? stop the samba daemon process ?

If you don’t need Samba (i.e. access to files using Windows explorer), you can kill  the two related processes smbdand nmbd - but rememeber, IF you do wish to restore Windows explorer access then you will either have to restart the process manually OR reboot the NAS.

To kill smbd and nmbd you can issue the following two commands from SSH command line:

kill -TERM cat /var/run/samba/smbd.pid

kill -TERM cat /var/run/samba/nmbd.pid

Cybernut1 wrote:

If you don’t need Samba (i.e. access to files using Windows explorer), you can kill  the two related processes smbdand nmbd - but rememeber, IF you do wish to restore Windows explorer access then you will either have to restart the process manually OR reboot the NAS.

 

To kill smbd and nmbd you can issue the following two commands from SSH command line:

kill -TERM cat /var/run/samba/smbd.pid

kill -TERM cat /var/run/samba/nmbd.pid

The question I have is WHY is his SAMBA process using 100% of the CPU.  I use SAMBA for windows access and have never seen this behaviour.  I think I would put a service ticket in with WD, somethings not right.

Thank you Cybernut1 for your answer, and the way to kill the samba process.

But as Vertech1 said, this is not a solution, you should be able to use Samba without having CPU usage of 100%. There is a problem that should be solved on WD side. A ticket should opened on the support team of WD, I don’t know how to do it, I hope Vertech1 knows and will do it, because this is a serious problem.

ptiscarabee wrote:

Thank you Cybernut1 for your answer, and the way to kill the samba process.

But as Vertech1 said, this is not a solution, you should be able to use Samba without having CPU usage of 100%. There is a problem that should be solved on WD side. A ticket should opened on the support team of WD, I don’t know how to do it, I hope Vertech1 knows and will do it, because this is a serious problem.

Well, I only provided you an answer to your question. As far as the problem is concerned, like Vertech1, I don’t experience any issues with Samba either…so for a problem that is affecting only you (as far as I know) it is not a problem that needs to be solved on WD side but on your side, with perhaps WD’s assistance. You can request WD tech support’s help by opening a request ticket. Just go to WD’s support section of website and look around for a link for that.

Do you know how to get in touch with WD support ?

Maybe this could be an explanation, I am using WD smartware for the backup of my hard drives, and the software is at the moment copying all the files from my C:\ drive continuously since 5 or 6 days now. It’s very long to synchronise, I copy maybe 1000 files per day, and I have more than 134.000 to copy !! It will be maybe finished en of this year…

Could this be the reason of 100% usage of the CPU ? Is WD Smartware using the smbd process to work ?

Thanks for your reponse.

Nobody there for help ?

ptiscarabee wrote:

Do you know how to get in touch with WD support ?

You can get in touch with WD support either by phone or email. Click on the link below for more information.

Contact WD

There is a special forum of WD Community, don’t you think the support HAS TO read the posts here and should get a response ? Don’t you think they do it ?

ptiscarabee wrote:

There is a special forum of WD Community, don’t you think the support HAS TO read the posts here and should get a response ? Don’t you think they do it ?

While I understand where you’re coming from, I believe you are misunderstanding the very purpose of the WD Community, which is user-to-user interaction. Staff members may post once in a while, but Western Digital has official, direct support channels for addressing technical issues. Users should not expect constant, steady, and/or direct responses from WD Staff members while on the forum.

Hopefully the Support Teams will be able to address your concerns.

http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

Hamlet wrote:

…I believe you are misunderstanding the very purpose of the WD Community, which is user-to-user interaction. 

 

Agreed. So many new forum posters don’t seem to understand this fact. They can and should contact WD support for issues they have that they cannot find an answer to in the product manual (which often many don’t even look at). And sometimes some questions are so repititve on these forums that people could easily find some of their answers by using the search function on this forum, but yet I will see every week the same questions about why is my data transfer slow, etc. over and over ad nauseum. Also, some questions can be also be self-resolve by doing simple Google searches. Not saying folks shouldn’t use the forum for questions they can’t find an answer to but saying often there are potential other avenues offering answers to some basic questions.

Having said that, I do also reserve some criticism for the quality of WD’s official tech support. I have often seen people complain here about the silliness of some of the basic troubleshooting tha level 1 often makes them go through. While I understand the necessity for those checklist items to be sure something simple wasn’t overlooked, those basic checklist items should be followedin some troubleshooting cases and not all in my opinion. It should be used on a case by case basis…but WD tech support applies them to all new cases. And the other annoying aspect that I have personally experienced is that often there is a disconnect between WD tech support itself. I had reported a bug back in March two days after getting my EX2 (which has now been fixed in a couple firmware versions earlier) and after I had reported here in a post 5 months later that the bug was still not fixed, WD tech support contacts me to gather data about the issue. I asked the person why they were contacting me to gather the details for the issue when I had already provided all the details to a Level 2 support person already and was even told a couple weeks later that WD was able to replicate the problem and acknowledged that it was a bug. But this kind of disconnect seems to happen fairly often within WD’s tech support…and part of the reason is their practice of closing a ticket even when the issue is unresolved with a broken bug. And finally, my other criticism is for WD’s QA department who sometimes have let glaring bugs (like the ftp bug that I had reported and even provided a workaround using SSH myself) pass through their QA process. I am a pretty tech-savvy user but even when I am frustrated by oversight of simple bugs like that, I can imagine how much more frustrated less tech-savvy folks would be, who are unable to disagnose what the problem is.

A lot of different people complain about the same problem over and over because this drive has major problems. It is SLOW!! The transcoding bring it to it’s knees, where it becomes unsuable. It’s a terrible design!

Anyone with a lot of data will encounter performance problem with this drive!

I returned mine due to the performance issues.

1 Like

Abner055 wrote:

A lot of different people complain about the same problem over and over because this drive has major problems. It is SLOW!!

Umm…and there’s plenty of people for whom it is NOT slow at all.

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud-EX2/Very-fast-transfer-speed-58-6-MB-s/m-p/735820

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud-EX2/Read-Write-Peformance-With-Latest-Firmware/m-p/821751

And many of the folks complaining about slowness issues are doing so while using wi-fi. I have seen countless such posts in my 8 months of using this forum.

Sure there are better perfoming NASes out there but they also cost hundreds of dollars more…and often do not offer the full firmware source code for advanced users to customize and compile (I know - I also have a QNAP).

The problem is not with the drive, but indeed in the SmartWare software. My MyCloudMirror does exactly the same: NAS CPU load jumps to 100% when SmartWare starts, mostly due to the smbd process, and backup goes extremely slow.

Try mapping your drive in Windows Explorer, and then use a normal backup program. I did that, and that works fine and pretty fast.

You basically answered your own question, which is why there wasn’t a huge response.

SmartWare hits the drive like mad, and I’d imagine you’ve got it installed on a Windows box.

Solution: map the drive, use something else to back it up if you don’t like the way SmartWare works.

I know it’s not the solution you want, but it’s the solution that exists.