SOLVED Disk writes + growing Wired memory

[JoeFlorida]

I'm not sure I have a problem but I noticed that my disks are busy doing writes, they never really get a full break. it's not a huge amount of data but it seems like my client PC should not be doing any reads or writes of the disk. I measured the network activity from one PC with iTunes and the only network traffic was NTP + Browser announcements. The disks get about 17M of data written to them over an hour. Like I said, not a huge amount but not zero.

Second, I seem to be leaking wired memory over time, after about a week the wired memory is at 8.5G, if I reboot it's starts at about 700M and slowly crawls up.
The NAS is mostly holding iTunes and any movies or TV episodes I've downloaded.

What's using the wired memory and/or how can I tell what's causing it to use so much Wired memory?
What's writing to disk and/or how can I tell what's writing to disk?

 

[Redcoat]

Search is your friend here. Try "Wired Memory" and "Constant Disk Writes" for starters... You'll find lots of discussion on these normal occurrences.

 

[nojohnny101]

They are normal, as @Redcoat alluded to.

 

[danb35]

What's using the wired memory and/or how can I tell what's causing it to use so much Wired memory?

ARC, mostly.

What's writing to disk and/or how can I tell what's writing to disk?

Most likely, the .system dataset. System logs, etc. Both things you're seeing are perfectly normal.

 

[JoeFlorida]

I confirmed that moving the system->'system dataset' over to the SSD boot drive instead of the RAID would eliminate the RAID disk writes. I decided to move it back to the RAID, because it gives me an almost instant indication of a drive failure. With zero bytes being written it could be days or weeks before I detect a drive failure, but with minimal writes every 5 minutes the NAS should email me of a drive failure almost as soon as it happens. I can order a replacement drive at the earliest possible time. The wired memory followed my movies I had watched and appears to be normal disk caching. The movies are relatively large ( multiple G's) and so would be the amount of cache used.

 

[danb35]

With zero bytes being written it could be days or weeks before I detect a drive failure

Not if you have email alerts set up properly on the server (and if you don't, you should)--the server will email you if a disk fails.