FreeNAS Stability Issues

JakeHillion

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Feb 13, 2019
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Having recently built a FreeNAS for my home, I'm having a lot of serious stability issues with the platform. I have a lot of experience with Linux systems, but not very much with BSD, so I thought I'd ask for help. My FreeNAS box is as detailed in my signature.

I'm having an issue where pretty much everything crashes. NFS tends to go quite quickly, then some time after it'll be the web interface, and at some point in there SSH and SFTP crashes too. Sometimes, the entire network on the machine will crash and it won't even be pingable, but when I go to physically check the console, the machine is running fine. I don't tend to get more than 24 hours out of it, if even that. A reboot brings everything back up.

The permanent clients are all NFS, with SMB and SFTP only used for occasional manual access. I have a Xen server that uses the NAS for some of the boot drives (I was in the process of migrating them all over, but stopped when I realised this was so unstable). Some other VMs on the server mount shares from the NAS via NFS, which all seems to work fine for a while. At 3AM, about 10 VMs are backed up using Xen Orchestra's Backup NG onto a different share on the NAS.

I have the Resilio Sync plugin and a Cloud Sync job set up as well.

In general use, the CPU usage according to netdata does not go above 40%. This includes during these backups. The only time it goes above 40% is when I use the FreeNAS shell to move files/perform a more complicated command. RAM seems to sit around 80% at all times.

I really would appreciate any help. I'm happy to provide any more information that's needed, it can just be a little difficult considering the Web UI is almost permanently crashed.

Thanks in advance,
Jake
 
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Which version of FreeNAS?
 

JakeHillion

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FreeNAS-11.2-U2.1
(Build Date: Feb 27, 2019 20:59)
 

sretalla

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I suspect that the 8GB of RAM is a contributor here.

8GB is the minimum for FreeNAS. If you want to run plugins, you need more RAM than the minimum to have it work well.

I'm not sure where you are seeing that RAM is at 80%, but I would expect that it's at 100% as soon as you start copying/syncing. FreeNAS will always use all the RAM available to cache unless it's used for something else.
 

JakeHillion

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I was a bit concerned about that but I've been watching netdata for a while. I think I may have slightly pulled the 80% number out of thin air, it seems to actually be about 90%, perhaps this was from another stage of testing. But on looking at the ARC, my ARC actual size is about 4.65GB. To me, this suggests that there is enough RAM for normal system operation, as the ARC is just for caching so would only lead to reduced read performance.

It seems that the Resilio Sync plugin is really light, only using about 150MB of RAM, unlike some others. If I'm wrong about any of this, please let me know - I just don't particularly want to buy more RAM if avoidable just at this moment, DDR3 Unbuffered ECC hasn't really gotten cheap yet. I do obviously understand the benefits that additional RAM would bring, but currently I would just like it stable.
 

Meyers

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This sounds similar to a major issue a few of us have been seeing. Basically the pool locks up completely so of course everything else crashes. Check this forum for recent posts about freezes. There's at least one ticket open as well. I doubt it's ram related.
 

JakeHillion

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Thanks for your response. It's definitely causing me massive problems at the moment. Has anyone had any luck fixing it yet, or is it something that requires a patch?
 

Meyers

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Did you do a full burn-in on this system? Memory test, CPU stress test, etc.?

I think if I were you I'd upgrade to 16GB. That's a cheap enough thing to do just to rule that out.

Most of what I wrote here should apply to you too, especially if you didn't do a full system burn-in.

But again, I think this is an OS issue considering I've never had this happen before 11.2. You could just install 11.1 and see if it happens with that. If not, I'd stick with 11.1 and watch the related threads / bugs.
 

Meyers

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JakeHillion

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Unfortunately it's crashed again, so I have to go and physically reset it before next performing any tests. It did work very well for quite a time, so it could be that it was when I updated that it broke. I'm assuming if I backdate my install like that, I will probably not be able to restore config and will need to do it manually? Thanks for your help, it definitely seems like we are having a very similar problem.
 

Meyers

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Yeah and I don't think the pool will be compatible with 11.1. Basically you'd be starting over from scratch. But....if it's crashing all the time, that's probably not a bad thing. I'd do the following first:

1. Upgrade RAM to 16GB.
2. Do a full memory test with memtest86++ or similar.
3. Do a CPU stress test while monitoring heat (I linked you instructions).
4. Check BIOS event logs.
5. Double check all logs for anything suspicious.

I increased the fan speed on mine to full on and have only had it freeze once since so heat might have been an issue, but I am skeptical. This thing is on the floor in a cold (< 70f) closet and I never had ANY issues for years before 11.2.
 
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