load management/samba

[Admin]

on our fileserver we are running samba (among other things). every couple of days samba starts eating up all our CPU cycles. i simply stop & start the samba daemon and everything goes back to normal.

is there anything i can run that will send me an alert when the load on the machine hits a certain level?

anyone use samba and have this problem? i have found a couple of things online that i wanna try, but nothing too solid...

[technobard]

Admin, you can cron a shell script using the output from "uptime" to do this.

Something like:

#!/bin/ksh

MAXLOAD=8.5

loadavg=`uptime | awk '{print $11}' | awk -F"," '{print $1}'`

if [ $loadavg -eq $MAXLOAD ]
then
     mailx ......  # send email notification
     # optionally, restart Samba process
fi

If you go this route, check the format of uptime on your system to make sure you "awk" the correct column.

Of course this only fixes the symptom. I'd post the problem to the samba newsgroup (assuming there is one).