Spontaneous reboots on Intel i5 and FreeBSD 9.0

[Marin Atanasov Nikolov]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 10:19 PM, John <john at 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/