Re: RFC: How ZFS handles arc memory use

On Tue, Mar 03, 2026 at 02:25:11PM -0800, Rick Macklem wrote:
| On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 12:33 PM Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko@ambrisko.com> wrote:
| >
| > On Sun, Nov 02, 2025 at 11:48:06AM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
| > | Am 2025-10-29 22:06, schrieb Doug Ambrisko:
| > | > It seems around the switch to OpenZFS I would have arc clean task
| > | > running
| > | > 100% on a core.  I use nullfs on my laptop to map my shared ZFS /data
| > | > partiton into a few vnet instances.  Over night or so I would get into
| > | > this issue.  I found that I had a bunch of vnodes being held by other
| > | > layers.  My solution was to reduce kern.maxvnodes and vfs.zfs.arc.max so
| > | > the ARC cache stayed reasonable without killing other applications.
| > | >
| > | > That is why a while back I added the vnode count to mount -v so that
| > | > I could see the usage of vnodes for each mount point.  I made a script
| > | > to report on things:
| > |
| > | Do you see this also with the nullfs mount option "nocache"?
| >
| > I seems to have run into this issue with nocache
| >   /data/jail/current/usr/local/etc/cups   /data/jail/current-other/usr/local/etc/cups     nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >   /data/jail/current/usr/local/etc/sane.d /data/jail/current-other/usr/local/etc/sane.d   nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >   /data/jail/current/usr/local/www        /data/jail/current-other/usr/local/www          nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >   /data/jail/current/usr/local/etc/nginx  /data/jail/current-other/usr/local/etc/nginx    nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >   /data/jail/current/tftpboot             /data/jail/current-other/tftpboot               nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >   /data/jail/current/usr/local/lib/grub   /data/jail/current-other/usr/local/lib/grub     nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >   /data/jail                              /data/jail/current-other/data/jail              nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >   /data/jail                              /data/jail/current/data/jail                    nullfs rw,nocache 0 0
| >
| > After a while (a couple of months or more).  My laptop was running slow
| > with a high load.  The perodic find was running slow.  arc_prunee was
| > spinning.  When I reduced the number of vnodes then things got better.
| > My vfs.zfs.arc_max is 1073741824 so that I have memory for other things.
| >
| > nocache does help taking longer to get into this situation.
| Have any of you guys tried increasing vfs.zfs.arc.free_target?
| 
| If I understand the code correctly, when freemem < vfs.zfs.arc.free_target
| the reaper thread (the one that does uma_zone_reclaim() to return pages
| to the system from the uma keg that the arc uses) should be activated.

I haven't tried that.  I set:
	kern.maxvnodes
	vfs.zfs.arc.min
	vfs.zfs.arc.max
	vfs.zfs.prefetch.disable=1

I need to make sure kern.maxvnodes is small enough so it doesn't thrash
when vfs.zfs.arc.max set to 1G.  The issues tend to take a while to
happen.  On the plus side I can adjust these when I hit them mostly by
reducing kern.maxvnodes without having to do a reboot.

Thanks,

Doug A.