Our Samba PDC server has been hosting three TB of data to our 500+ users [Windows NT/XP] for the last three years using Samba without a problem. Today all shares went very slow. Also, the main smbd kept spawning new processes, so we had 1600+ running SMDB's (normally we average 250). It crashed the SUN E3500 cluster twice. After a lot of searching, I decided to rm /var/locks/*.tdb . Happy again.

Question: Is there any method of keeping the *.tdb files in top condition, or how can I detect early corruption?

Answer: Yes, run tdbbackup each time after stopping nmbd and before starting nmbd.

Question: What I also would like to mention is that the service latency seems a lot lower than before the locks cleanup. Any ideas on keeping it top notch?

Answer: Yes. Same answer as for previous question!