Disks Churning

[Timothy R. Butler]

I've been running FreeNAS 9.1.1 for the last few days and since yesterday evening, I've noticed that my server constantly has disk activity, despite (as far as I can discern) no computer reading or writing to it (the drive activity light just stay on solidly and I can hear the disks reading/writing). I turned it off last night and just turned it back on and the disk activity picked right back up. I have a 4 disk RAIDZ array. Right now, 44% of the CPU of my little HP MicroServer says that it is being used by system processes, but I can't quite figure out what process is using it. As near as I can tell, the busiest processes are collectd (it seems to be, perhaps, compressing old logs?) and several python2.7 instances that appear related to the FreeNAS web interface.

Could it be as innocuous as collectd simply doing some log house keeping or is there something more at play does it sound like?

Thanks!

Tim

 

[cyberjock]

Have you ever done a zpool scrub? You should be scheduling them regularly, and they do make the pool go busy for hours/days(depending on the speed of your pool and how full it is).

 

[Timothy R. Butler]

Thanks, cyberjock. I can't say that I have. Would it possibly have scheduled something like that on its own post-upgrade from 8.x to 9.x?

Is there a good guide on doing this?

Thanks,
Tim

 

[cyberjock]

It is defaulted to 35 days(should be bi-weekly for consumer disks). The whole reason why the upgrade added it is because its imperative to ensure your zpool is healthy and only a small number of people were doing the due diligence to actually figure out that they needed to do zpool scrubs.

I'd recommend you check out the manual on scrubs and do some googling. Then adjust the schedule accordingly.

 

[Timothy R. Butler]

Thanks! That helps a lot. At least I don't have to worry something was going wrong with the system. I was hoping it was a maintenance task.