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Date:      Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:29:14 +0200
From:      Marin Atanasov Nikolov <dnaeon@gmail.com>
To:        John <john@theusgroup.com>
Cc:        ml-freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Spontaneous reboots on Intel i5 and FreeBSD 9.0
Message-ID:  <CAJ-UWtT8pFn86OMpPG47ryKN%2B%2B=1KfaQX3JtbCLuu_kByvtMzA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJ-UWtR%2Bymv_%2BxpLcw01r9r=ym6gMh%2BHt4KfTabWQXXcAv5Ydw@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CAJ-UWtSANRMsOqwW9rJ6Eebta6=AiHeNO6fhPO0mhYhZiMmn4A@mail.gmail.com> <op.wq3zxn038527sy@ronaldradial.versatec.local> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1301180758460.96418@wonkity.com> <1358527685.32417.237.camel@revolution.hippie.lan> <20130118173602.GA76438@neutralgood.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1301181313560.1604@wonkity.com> <CAJ-UWtRRfCKg9GBR_ppvtjvJGadiOXMXBFBpX7tAvLEXDoZHQg@mail.gmail.com> <20130119201914.84B761CB@server.theusgroup.com> <CAJ-UWtR%2Bymv_%2BxpLcw01r9r=ym6gMh%2BHt4KfTabWQXXcAv5Ydw@mail.gmail.com>

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Hello again :)

Here's my update on these spontaneous reboots after less than a week since
I've updated to stable/9.

First two days the system was running fine with no reboots happening, so I
though that this update actually fixed it, but I was wrong.

The reboots are still happening and still no clear evidence of the root
cause. What I did so far:

* Ran disks tests -- looking good
* Ran memtest -- looking good
* Replaced power cables
* Ran UPS tests -- looking good
* Checked for any bad capacitors -- none found
* Removed all ZFS snapshots

There is also one more machine connected to the same UPS, so if it was a
UPS issue I'd expect that the other one reboots too, but that's not the
case.

Now that I've excluded the hardware part of this problem I started looking
again into the software side, and this time in particular -- ZFS.

I'm running FreeBSD 9.1-STABLE #1 r245686 on a Intel i5 with 8Gb of memory.

A quick look at top(1) showed lots of memory usage by ARC and my available
free memory dropping fast. I've made a screenshot, which you can see on the
link below:

* http://users.unix-heaven.org/~dnaeon/top-zfs-arc.jpg

So I went to the FreeBSD Wiki and started reading the ZFS Tuning Guide [1],
but honestly at the end I was not sure which parameters I need to
increase/decrease and to what values.

Here's some info about my current parameters.

    % sysctl vm.kmem_size_max
    vm.kmem_size_max: 329853485875

    % sysctl vm.kmem_size
    vm.kmem_size: 8279539712

    % sysctl vfs.zfs.arc_max
    vfs.zfs.arc_max: 7205797888

    % sysctl kern.maxvnodes
    kern.maxvnodes: 206227

There's one script at the ZFSTuningGuide which calculates kernel memory
utilization, and for me these values are listed below:

    TEXT=22402749, 21.3649 MB
    DATA=4896264192, 4669.44 MB
    TOTAL=4918666941, 4690.81 MB

While looking for ZFS tuning I've also stumbled upon this thread in the
FreeBSD Forums [2], where the OP describes a similar behaviour to what I am
already experiencing, so I'm quite worried now that the reason for these
crashes is ZFS.

Before jumping into any change to the kernel parameters (vm.kmem_size,
vm.kmem_max_size, kern.maxvnodes, vfs.zfs.arc_max) I'd like to hear any
feedback from people that have already done such optimizations on their ZFS
systems.

Could you please share what are the optimal values for these parameters on
a system with 8Gb of memory? Is there a way to calculate these values or is
it just a "test-and-see-which-fits-better" way of doing this?

Thanks and regards,
Marin

[1]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide
[2]: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9143


On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Marin Atanasov Nikolov <dnaeon@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 10:19 PM, John <john@theusgroup.com> wrote:
>
>> >At 03:00am I can see that periodic(8) runs, but I don't see what could
>> have
>> >taken so much of the free memory. I'm also running this system on ZFS and
>> >have daily rotating ZFS snapshots created - currently the number of ZFS
>> >snapshots are > 1000, and not sure if that could be causing this. Here's
>> a
>> >list of the periodic(8) daily scripts that run at 03:00am time.
>> >
>> >% ls -1 /etc/periodic/daily
>> >800.scrub-zfs
>> >
>> >% ls -1 /usr/local/etc/periodic/daily
>> >402.zfSnap
>> >403.zfSnap_delete
>>
>> On a couple of my zfs machines, I've found running a scrub along with
>> other
>> high file system users to be a problem.  I therefore run scrub from cron
>> and
>> schedule it so it doesn't overlap with periodic.
>>
>> I also found on a machine with an i3 and 4G ram that overlapping scrubs
>> and
>> snapshot destroy would cause the machine to grind to the point of being
>> non-responsive. This was not a problem when the machine was new, but
>> became one
>> as the pool got larger (dedup is off and the pool is at 45% capacity).
>>
>> I use my own zfs management script and it prevents snapshot destroys from
>> overlapping scrubs, and with a lockfile it prevents a new destroy from
>> being
>> initiated when an old one is still running.
>>
>> zfSnap has its -S switch to prevent actions during a scrub which you
>> should
>> use if you haven't already.
>>
>>
> Hi John,
>
> Thanks for the hints. It was a long time since I've setup zfSnap and I've
> just checked the configuration and I am using the "-s -S" flags, so there
> should be no overlapping.
>
> Meanwhile I've updated to 9.1-RELEASE, but then I hit an issue when trying
> to reboot the system (which appears to be discussed a lot in a separate
> thread).
>
> Then I've updated to stable/9, so at the least the reboot issue is now
> solved. Since I've to stable/9 I'm monitoring the system's memory usage and
> so far it's been pretty stable, so I'll keep an eye of an update to
> stable/9 has actually fixed this strange issue.
>
> Thanks again,
> Marin
>
>
>> Since making these changes, a machine that would have to be rebooted
>> several
>> times a week has now been up 61 days.
>>
>> John Theus
>> TheUs Group
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Marin Atanasov Nikolov
>
> dnaeon AT gmail DOT com
> http://www.unix-heaven.org/
>



-- 
Marin Atanasov Nikolov

dnaeon AT gmail DOT com
http://www.unix-heaven.org/



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