FreeNAS hangs on Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf

[TS601]

Hey all,

So I have this weird problem. This forum is the closest by subject that I have found.

I'm using HP Microserver w/ 4 SATA drives and a 4GB USB stick. Works great. So one day - it doesn't. The system starts up, but hangs on Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf. I didn't really fiddle around with it, since I know very little of FreeBSD. What I do is pop in the installation CD for 8.0.4 (the version I was previously running) and go through the standard upgrade procedure.

After the installer is through, the system reboots and loads up nicely, and then performs upgrade of the DB. Reboots again and... gets back to the same problem. Performed this procedure several times, with no joy. Tried searching all over the web, came up empty.

Any ideas? I'm kinda blank here :-\

TIA!

 

[DarkFires]

I'm having the exact same problem.

Mine will last for 1 day up to 1 week. Then this problem occurs.

After much testing I was able to encourage the problem by turning ON "autotune".

This points towards a possible solution, but I have not tried this yet:
http://forums.freenas.org/faq.php?faq=general_freenas#faq_slow_transfers_cannot_access_gui

 

[DarkFires]

I've managed to get my NAS stable.

I'm only running 3GB RAM as I am not in need of higher performance. However, for zfs it is recommended to have 4GB or more. Turns out the system config isn't accounting for this properly. I followed this document to set some tuning values, and my NAS has been 100% stable since. Tunables is found under System->Tunables on FreeNAS 8.2.0
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide#i386

I'm still tweaking the numbers until I get an optimal and stable configuration, but this is working perfectly for now. The manual tuning values I set are below for reference, but make sure to follow the FreeBSD tuning guide for your system. Probably a good idea to test your RAM too.

vm.kmem_size="1536M"
vm.kmem_size_max="1536M"
vfs.zfs.arc_max="128M"
vfs.zfs.vdev.cache.size="16M"

I'm currently running FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r11950)

Hope this helps, it has fixed it for me!