12.17.08
Event 2017 and 2021 from “srv” in Vista
Yeah, this will be a technical one, but thankfully pretty short.
I noticed today that both my Vista sp1 machines (one x64 and one x86) were getting a bunch of errors in the log claiming that
The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.
and
The server was unable to allocate a work item 1 times in the last 60 seconds.
This was rather disconcerting as it was making it difficult to copy files between the machines without errors. A quick google search showed I wasn’t the only one and after a little bit of digging, I came on the quick and dirty issue – Vista appears to have some sort of memory leak in the new SMB2 server that makes it eventually reach an internal limit and refuse to allocate any more. This makes network shares break.
Not wanting to just disable the SMB2 sharing as it’s amazingly fast at copying files across gigabit networks, I went looking for the more simple solution but wanted to get some data first. Firing up poolmon to look at the nonpaged pool before and after and restarting the “server” service, I noticed the entry marked “LS2w” dropped from 256k of allocated nonpaged pool to 0 allocated nonpaged pool – fairly obviously the source of the leak (LS2 is pretty clearly an acronym for Lanman Server 2, which is really old school naming).
In any case, the easy solution is to just go into the “Services” part of managing “My Computer” and just restart the “Server” service. Makes the problem go away for another week or two.
In the end, although it didn’t really give me any information to work on the issue, it might be useful for someone at Microsoft if they’re eventually trying to track down the bug. Hope so…
Daniel Said:
January 22, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I have exactly the same issue and restarting “Server” service is kind of not acceptable. I also don’t want to turn off SMB2. Do you have any update for it?
jw Said:
January 22, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I haven’t heard anything since I posted unfortunately. Frustrating because I don’t like the workarounds much either. Restarting “Server” really isn’t too bad though – it only affects existing sessions so you can just do it when no one’s using the box.
Jonas Said:
March 12, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I installed a file server for a client.
Vista Business 32. Clients (about 15) are XP pro, and Vista business, all 32bits.
Every ~24-48h, I have to reboot the server !!! Because nobody can access it anymore ! Hundreds of Event ID 2017 in system log.
Even disabling SMB2 doesn’t fix this !!
I’m looking for a fix for days !!
Should I definitely forget about this and install a XP Pro instead ?
DAMN!
Jonas Said:
March 12, 2009 at 9:29 pm
(sorry for my poor english…) 🙁
jw Said:
March 12, 2009 at 11:55 pm
It’s possible Microsoft put something into the file server to prevent people breaking the license agreement, which limits you to 10 clients (part 3c). If disabling SMB2 didn’t fix your issue then it’s probably something different to the one I found, which is a pity.
I haven’t seen the 2017 errors since I “upgraded” to the Windows 7 beta, though I guess that beta software isn’t a good solution for your client. This leaves the options of messing with XP (still in violation of the license), switching a Server system, or figuring out the root cause.
Good luck!
John
aj Said:
June 16, 2009 at 1:19 am
I’m having this issue on XP Pro x64 and Vista Business x86 (same box, changed OS thinking that would help). Machine goes inaccessible after a few hours of a restart. I will try turning off SMB2.
Adune Said:
June 18, 2009 at 6:35 am
This is a really annoying problem in Vista/etc. Basically, you don’t share files from a Vista machine.
I was using my V64 at home as a file server inside the house. I can crash the service inside of 30 seconds by selecting an entire folder of content & copying it to the V64 share from MacOS or Linux.
I found that as long as I only select 5 files at a time when copying content, I haven’t had the crashes. As I’m only using 4 different devices on the network, I’m good.
There’s 2 groups of people that have had these issues:
-People having SMB2 problems, disabling SMB2 fixes it for them
-People having issues with the 10 connection limit on SMB.
I’m in the second category. It looks like linux/mac OS will create multiple smb connections when doing a large number of files. This makes SMB blow up on Vista. Very annoying. I’m file serving off Linux instead now.