N00B problems - Web GUI hanging, problems streaming, connectivity issues, etc

[blk]

hi,

I've spent the last few week researching and tinkering with freenas. I'm using the latest 8.3 p1.
I'm running it as a VM using esxi 5.1.
- 1 cpu, 1 core (as per docs)
- 4GB of RAM.
- 1 HD to store the FreeNAS image
- a 2nd 1TB HD for the ZFS volume. no datasets defined.
- 1 NIC - VMXNET2.

I know the main benefits of ZFS are things like it's raid capability etc, but I have a very simple setup and I backup important stuff to the cloud so I don't need a heavy local solution. My intention is to use it as a very simple file server setup.

As the title suggests I've been having all sorts of problems with this :(

1. Web GUI hangs randomly - The web gui will stop responding. It will just be stuck in a "waiting for ....". I'm using chrome for the browser, but found it doesn't matter much (as firefox doesn't seem to work at all). If i use Chrome's developer tools i can see the it sends a request for the page but doesn't receive a reply. If i inspect the nginx logs on freenas, i can see the logs report 200 for the requests. I try restarting the nginx service, but doesn't do anything. the only solution is a reboot of freenas. None of my searches are turning up any information from people experiencing similar issue.

2. Because I have mixed environment, the easiest test was just CIFS. I wanted to compare CIFS throughput to what I know i can get using a windows box. I was able to get it up to ~60MB/s avg on like 3GB total transfer with lk 1GB+ files. Not stellar, but acceptable. So I try playing back a wmv. WMP hangs. I have a network monitor widget thing and it tells me we are not getting any data. Windows explorer looks busy, but is still responsive. and after ~2 mins or so, reports to me that the share is no longer available. At this time also, it is typical that the web gui will also become unreachable. RAM and CPU utilization on the box is low. running top in freenas console shows no culprits.

3. Following above, I try deleting files. Well that was fun too. I got the similar symptom of Windows explorer looking busy with a win7 delete file dialog popped up saying "looking for files..." and then just sitting there. Again, after 2 mins, it just craps out saying the share is no longer available.

Please help. I can provide additional details if requested.

I'm mostly wondering if anyone recognizes these symptoms as "another N00B who didn't RTFM properly". If so please kindly point me at what I should've done and I'll be grateful.

Thanks in advance.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm mostly wondering if anyone recognizes these symptoms as "another N00B who didn't RTFM properly". If so please kindly point me at what I should've done and I'll be grateful.

Almost...

1. One core is cutting it really small. You really should look at no less than 2.
2. RAM, the manual says at least 6GB for good performance.
3. ESXi isn't a recommended environment for FreeNAS unless you know what you are doing. I'd say you probably don't because you had to post in the forum forhelp. So make sure you are using backups. There are serious performance penalties when trying to use ZFS and FreeNAS with ESXi.

 

[blk]

Thanks noobsauce80.

1. the docs, http://www.freenas.org/images/resou...8.3_guide.html#__RefHeading__16625_1239453677 , mention to use only one cpu. I remember reading somewhere (though I can't find it now) that it should be 1 core as well. I'll try 2 or 4. Do you think that the 3 things above are related to the number of cores despite the extremely low cpu usage?

2. the docs here http://www.freenas.org/images/resou...s8.3_guide.html#__RefHeading__7608_1957652121 say that a good rule of thumb is 1GB / 1TB.

http://www.freenas.org/images/resou...s8.3_guide.html#__RefHeading__7608_1957652121

I've read elsewhere that this is a good rule. I've also tried giving the VM as much as 12GB of RAM to experiment but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Is it your impression that the issues i describe above would be RAM related?
for e.g. when attempting streaming, from vSpehere I can see the consumption of RAM on the freenas image. I am also running top. As i mention, RAM and CPU utilization are low.

3.

ESXi isn't a recommended environment for FreeNAS unless you know what you are doing

Fair enough.

There are serious performance penalties when trying to use ZFS and FreeNAS with ESXi.

Can you point me at some documentation about this? My research on the topic has shown that the bottleneck is typically at the storage level. People have tried to get around this by running the ZFS disk without an underlying VMFS by using RDM. But other people have questioned this and running various tests shown this (at least for the latest versions of VMFS) to be false (i.e. the improvements of running ZFS using RDM vs on top of VMFS are marginal).

Your first 2 points are fair, just given what I'm seeing (low cpu/ram utilization during symptoms) I don't believe the issues to be resource related.

I can believe the 3rd, except for other people who are running FreeNAS on top of ESXi without experiencing the same types of issues I'm seeing. I mean even the Web GUI craps out. If it is in fact the environment, I have no problem accepting that, I'd just like to hear some first hand accounts from others and/or maybe pointers on what I'm missing here.

 

[cyberjock]

1. If you don't have enough processing power the CIFS protocol can timeout before FreeNAS comes up with a response.
2. You go short on RAM and people have had all sorts of odd results, up to and including kernel panic. The manual says 6GB+1GB for each TB and I always recommend that. Using less is just bad.
3. Do some searching of the forums and support ticket 1531 on NFS. ESXi does some stuff in the name of data security that is above and beyond ZFS, so there's a performance hit because FreeNAS can't cope with ESXi.

If you are short on RAM that can manifest itself as low CPU usage(too much time waiting for hard drives to process small amounts of data) as well as low RAM(the system tries to allocate ram for different things and you may be starving a cache that is too small because of your limited RAM). So yeah, don't consider those being "low" as being a sign that all is fine. In particular, if you have less than 4GB of RAM you get a warning every bootup that ZFS write cache is disabled. This is a MAJOR performance killer. The number of people that have posted with performance issues with less than 6GB of RAM is so high I ignore their thread and let someone else deal with it(if someone else chooses to) because I'm done trying to tell people to follow a manual. It's like they know better than the people that made it...

 

[blk]

I see. I guess I misinterpreted a lot of things reading the manual. I did not think that it meant 6GB base and then 1GB / 1TB of disk.

Given my needs are not making use of many of the features of ZFS, the relatively high system requirements and the issues with running FreeNAS on ESXi, I don't think FreeNAS is a particularly good fit at this time.

:(

Guess i'm off to figure a simple windows or linux solution.

 

[Stephens]

I did not think that it meant 6GB base and then 1GB / 1TB of disk.

I'm not convinced it does mean that. My experience certainly doesn't support it. I think it means 6GB or 1GB/1TB, whichever is greater. It'd quickly get ridiculous the other way. For my 6x2TB RAID-Z2, that'd be 12TB for the pool + 6GB (base) = 18GB. I'm running it just fine with 8GB. Even if you throw out the 2 drives worth of parity information from the size of the pool, you end up with 4x2TB = 8GB (incremental RAM requirement) + 6GB Base, so basically 16GB. Minimum. Again, I don't think this is what the manual intends to say.

Either way, I think you're on the wrong side of the 6GB base. The manual recommends UFS for "low RAM" situations.

 

[jgreco]

The FreeNAS middleware wants around 6GB all on its own (ref: comments in source) to function properly.

As a result, I think it certainly does mean 6GB base and then 1GB/1TB of disk, but I suspect that means "for a heavily loaded and busy system." For a system that has a ton of storage that is infrequently accessed, however, a much less aggressive strategy seems to be fine; there are numerous examples of people with larger pools on 8GB. The vast majority of home users are not going to be actively serving dozens or hundreds of clients simultaneously, so a smaller memory configuration is going to be successful in most of those scenarios.

 

[cyberjock]

The FreeNAS middleware wants around 6GB all on its own (ref: comments in source) to function properly.

As a result, I think it certainly does mean 6GB base and then 1GB/1TB of disk, but I suspect that means "for a heavily loaded and busy system." For a system that has a ton of storage that is infrequently accessed, however, a much less aggressive strategy seems to be fine; there are numerous examples of people with larger pools on 8GB. The vast majority of home users are not going to be actively serving dozens or hundreds of clients simultaneously, so a smaller memory configuration is going to be successful in most of those scenarios.

My home server is 18x2TB on RAIDZ3 with 12GB of RAM and is flawless after fixing a user error(new thread coming soon on the whole story as a lessons learned for other noobs).

 

[blk]

Thanks for following up with comments everyone.

Given my use case of 1x1TB drive and 1-3 simultaneous connections..., i find it hard to justify allocating 6-8GB of RAM, just to meet the minimum reqs.

I mean in future I certainly see myself expanding, but not to the same degree most of you have (multiple drives in RAID config, etc.). I was mainly interested in FreeNAS because of the self correcting/resilience of ZFS and the convenience of a platform that supported all kinds of connectivity options (CIFS, AFP, NFS, ftp, etc).
If I wanted UFS, I would've just done ubuntu with ext4 or something.

In addition, given noobsauce80's comments re:ESXi, it just doesn't seem like a good fit for what i'd like to do.... :(