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Date:      Tue, 26 May 2009 07:50:37 -0600
From:      Adam Vande More <amvandemore@gmail.com>
To:        Steve Bertrand <steve@ibctech.ca>, Howard Jones <howard.jones@network-i.net>,  Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>, FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org, Graeme Dargie <arab@tangerine-army.co.uk>, Valentin Bud <valentin.bud@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD & Software RAID
Message-ID:  <6201873e0905260650s6172cc71ib53d61f9e9affb2d@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4A1BEAC8.6030505@ibctech.ca>
References:  <4A1AA3DC.5020300@network-i.net> <01FB8F39BAD0BD49A6D0DA8F7897392956C7@Mercury.galaxy.lan.lcl> <139b44430905250937u3410ac24g1f0b9f89a0d51f22@mail.gmail.com> <20090525165618.GB8441@Grumpy.DynDNS.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0905251907460.39949@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> <20090525174818.GA32121@Grumpy.DynDNS.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0905251954230.40402@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> <4A1BB15C.40300@network-i.net> <4A1BEAC8.6030505@ibctech.ca>

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Sweet thanks for the info.  Building one of those boxes is next in the list.

On 5/26/09, Steve Bertrand <steve@ibctech.ca> wrote:
> Howard Jones wrote:
>> Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>> you are right. you can't be happy of warm house without getting really
>>> cold some time :)
>>>
>>> that's why it's excellent that ZFS (and few other things) is included
>>> in FreeBSD but it's COMPLETELY optional.
>>>
>> Well, I switched from the heater that doesn't work and is poorly
>> documented (gvinum) to the one that does and  is (zfs, albeit mostly
>> documented by Sun), and so far I am warm :-)
>>
>> Once I'd increased kmem, at least. I did get a panic before that, but
>> now I am shuffling data happily and slightly faster than gvinum did, and
>> memory has levelled off at about 160MB for zfs. I'll be keeping my
>> previous hardware RAID in one piece for a little while though, I think,
>> just in case! (old Adaptec card with a 2TB limit on containers).
>
> I moved my AMANDA tapeless backup system to ZFS well over a year ago.
> It's got four 500GB SATA drives.
>
> At first, it would panic frequently sometime during the backup. The
> backups peak at ~400Mbps of network traffic. I adopted the following
> script to write out the memory usage during the backup, so I could
> better tune the system (sorry, I can't recall where I found this code snip):
>
> #!/bin/sh
>
> TEXT=`/sbin/kldstat | /usr/bin/awk 'BEGIN {print "16i 0";} NR>1 \
> {print toupper($4) "+"} END {print "p"}' | dc`
>
> DATA=`/usr/bin/vmstat -m | sed -Ee \
> '1s/.*/0/;s/.* ([0-9]+)K.*/\1+/;$s/$/1024*p/' | dc`
>
> TOTAL=$((DATA + TEXT))
> DATE=`/bin/date | awk '{print $4}'`
>
> /bin/echo $DATE `/bin/echo $TOTAL | \
> /usr/bin/awk '{print $1/1048576}'` >> /home/steve/mem.usage
>
> Cronned every minute, I'd end up with a file like this:
>
> 19:16:01 500.205
> 19:17:02 485.699
> 19:18:01 474.305
> 19:19:01 473.265
> 19:20:01 471.874
> 19:21:02 471.94
>
> ...the next day, I'd be able to review this file to see what the memory
>  usage was at the time of the panic/reboot.
>
> I found that:
>
> vm.kmem_size="1536M"
> vm.kmem_size_max="1536M"
>
> made the system extremely stable, and since then:
>
> amanda# uptime
>  9:01AM  up 81 days, 17:06,
>
> I'm about to upgrade the system to -STABLE today...
>
> Steve
>


-- 
Adam Vande More
Systems Administrator
Mobility Sales



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