Freenas + CIF = Freeze / Hangs / Halts on File Transfer

[JibbaJabba]

Morning Everyone

Pulling out my hair and don't have much hair left!

I really want to use Freenas but its driving me mad. Every time i do large file transfers ( 1TB or 2TB ) or anything really, Freenas just hangs and is not responsive which results in me powering off the machine at the wall.

Setup :

• IBM m1015 ( flashed with SAS9211-8i FW 19.00.00.00=IT )
• Supermicro MB x9scm-f
• 16Bay 3u Supermicro chasis
• Backplane SAS 2008
• 16 x 2TB Seagate ST32000641AS ( only 8 connected Raidz2 )
• 1GB network
• no plugins
• fresh install ( for the 1000000x time )
• FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x64
• 32GB Kingston ECC ram
• No Deduplication

Tried :

• Installing Freenas on different USB's.
• Installing Synology ( to confirm drives are 100% did SMART tests , works fine )
• MemTest ( fine )
• SMART test on Freenas ( fine )
• Different network
• Different PC to transfer files

Issues :

• Transfers over the network to the Freenas box causes the system to hang and halt.
• Have noticed that when i transfer files, memory consumption increases 20GB+ and rises.
  
• CPU is fine , sitting at low %

let me know if iv left out any important information.

 

[cyberjock]

Start off with reflashing your card to the firmware for your FreeNAS version. That means reflash it to v16. You don't want to know the nasty things I've seen with mismatched firmware and driver versions. ;)

The memory consumption is how ZFS works. That's not an "issue".. that's by design.

 

[JibbaJabba]

Thanks Cyberjock, reflashed to version 16. Was busy doing when you mentioned it.
Transfer is busy, so hopefully it works *cross-fingers*

The reason why i put the RAM in issue, it seems like it basically runs out of ram before it halts...

lol, what is that profile picture? bunny with rabies / ebola?

 

[cyberjock]

The Rabbit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog

It could be that you run out of RAM. To test that you can enable the autotune feature in FreeNAS.

 

[JibbaJabba]

hahah so weird!

Seems like everything is running smoothly, currently transferring 2TB of data across...10% without any issues so far.
Currently Autotune isn't enabled... should i enable it? will it make things better?

How does autotune test the ram? what symptoms should i look for to know if its fine or not?

 

[cyberjock]

Autotune artificially limits the amount of RAM that ZFS can use. Yes, it will make your system slower. But, if it doesn't crash anymore you have two choices:

1. Leave autotune enabled and accept the slower performance (which could range from unnoticable to terrifyingly slow)
2. Add more RAM (which in your case means a new motherboard and CPU too)

The only reason to enable autotune is to artifically limit ZFS when your working data set is larger than what you can fit in RAM (which causes a crash). So if it doesn't crash anymore with autotune enabled then that pretty much tells you what the problem is. :P

 

[JibbaJabba]

Update : copying seems fine. haven't played with Autotune yet :)

find it so weird that the M1015 HBA used to kill the network interfaces and put the machine to a halt. so weird!

 

[cyberjock]

find it so weird that the M1015 HBA used to kill the network interfaces and put the machine to a halt. so weird!

I'm not sure what that is about. I've never seen anyone mention that using the M1015 killed network interface or halted the machine. I'd bet dollars to donuts something else was wrong and the M1015 simply made the problem manifest itself in nasty ways.