wired memory trending upwards - is this a leak?

[stryker17]

i'm trying to figure out why i'm getting dropouts while streaming media from my zfs mirrored drive. i have dual 2TB RE4 drives that worked w/o issue on 0.7.2. my investigation has lead me to note that the wired memory keeps trending upwards and i wonder if this is an issue (though not necessarily the reason for my media stutters). while i recognize from other posts that i shouldn't be concerned at the loss of 'free' memory, i do wonder if the increasing chunks of wired memory is an issue. isn't wired memory "don't touch this" memory held by the kernel? you can see in my graph when i streamed one video and then later streamed another video that the wired memory just increases. should i be concerned about this? note, i was streaming over nfs-tcp.

 

[William Grzybowski]

ZFS just uses a lot of ram, the more the better.
It was designed for SUN and the minimal setup they had was a 64GB system, so I don't think you should worry about unless you're getting very bad performance.

 

[stryker17]

Thanks William. So far, no ill effects despite the fact that wired memory is so high.

on a side note, i did discover the problem with my streaming stutters from this [media] server. i had the advanced power management set to 64 w/ standby time set to 10 minutes on my mirrored zfs drives - thinking i'd get a little slow spinup but that i'd save power when the media server is idle. well, even after the drive is spun up, it seems the APM of 64 causes performance issues. i disabled APM and the problems went away - no more stuttering reads. also, my write speed has also gone up to about 42MB/s from my window box (according to fastcopy). note i'also saw online that people reported high aging of the drives when APM is used (according to the numbers they saw in their S.M.A.R.T. reports) - perhaps due to the spinups/downs.