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Forum Discussion
6.4 makes our 516 to lock up during disk balance, need to abort. URGENT!
The 6.4 firmware updated continues to screw up everything, it's becoming the worst update ever from Netgear. During a disk balance task, our 516 completely locks up. No frontview access, no SSH, no ...
So far I have only disabled balance and defray jobs. Having run btrfs on my own Fedora workstation for quite some time, I've learned that these jobs can introduce a special kind of load on the filessystem that can at times render it nearly unresponsive. What worries me a little is the added task of quota in this release. Even with the very latest kernel and btrfsprogs builds, I found that enabling quota can cause seriously problems, and I ultimately decided having those enabled just wasn't worth the headache. We don't have that option here -- and I do actually like being able to see how much space the snapshots actually consume -- so we'll see how things go from here.
Based on my own experience, I'm leaving snapshots enabled. Indeed even after having all the apps started back up and with a Time Machine backup job running, I noticed btrfs-cleaner kick off (to clean up after scheduled removal of snapshots), and while the process and I/O wait times predictably increased the system remained operational. So I'm not too worried about snapshots.
Given the size of our /data volumes I think we can live without the balance and defray jobs for a while. I tend to run them monthly anyway. But I'd rather not have my NAS crash each month. ;) I do tend to keep an eye on "btrfs fi sh /", as I've found that there is something on my NAS -- could be an app -- that causes it's extents to get fully allocated even though the filessystem usage is quite normal. This can cause headaches when doing installs or updates of apps, so I tend to check it every few weeks and do a manual balance on / to clean it up. I did one such balance just last night after getting the NAS back up and it ran just fine. Makes me wonder if this new behavior is the result of enabling quota on /data.
I quite agree about enabling ssh access, and I have done this from the old RAIDIator days. But it's not necessarily for everyone and there is a mode the NAS can be started up in that enables Netgear to access the NAS remotely via ssh for support purposes.
Based on my own experience, I'm leaving snapshots enabled. Indeed even after having all the apps started back up and with a Time Machine backup job running, I noticed btrfs-cleaner kick off (to clean up after scheduled removal of snapshots), and while the process and I/O wait times predictably increased the system remained operational. So I'm not too worried about snapshots.
Given the size of our /data volumes I think we can live without the balance and defray jobs for a while. I tend to run them monthly anyway. But I'd rather not have my NAS crash each month. ;) I do tend to keep an eye on "btrfs fi sh /", as I've found that there is something on my NAS -- could be an app -- that causes it's extents to get fully allocated even though the filessystem usage is quite normal. This can cause headaches when doing installs or updates of apps, so I tend to check it every few weeks and do a manual balance on / to clean it up. I did one such balance just last night after getting the NAS back up and it ran just fine. Makes me wonder if this new behavior is the result of enabling quota on /data.
I quite agree about enabling ssh access, and I have done this from the old RAIDIator days. But it's not necessarily for everyone and there is a mode the NAS can be started up in that enables Netgear to access the NAS remotely via ssh for support purposes.
I haven't enabled disk quotas for our shares, and after all the issues I came across after the update I doubt I ever will.
I only updated for the option to see just how much space was being consumed by snapshots, which to my surprise was a lot. I had 3.5TB worth of snaphost and only 1.7TB of actual data, so that helped me clear quite a bit of space. Also, the shares now show how much space they're consuming, which is also nice.
Clearing the scheduled balance job brought the performance to normal again, and disabling snaphots has actually improved it a bit. It is now more responsive than before, at least the frontview and file browsing are.
I don't have many apps running apart from Anti Virus, just the SMB prefs panel and ReadyNAS Surveillance recording from 9 IP cameras (total bandwith for all of them is 12,030 Kbps so that should never put a load on the CPU. My guess is that someone screwed up in the implementation of the Balance, Quota and Sync features.
I'm not a Linux expert, but I don't mind learning and using the terminal to check up on things. The web ui can only get you so far.
On the 104, I have no issue with the OS 6.4.0 so far it works fine. This time with anti virus active but bit rot disabled.
The 204 so far had one hang (I have to pull the power plug), and I think that it was during a defrag. (Anti-virus active but no bit-rot)
And this morning I found it blinking. It did now want to power down, so I also ahd to pull the plug. When it restarted I saw that it was in a degraded state and had to resync. Itr Resynced and all drives operate normally. So whatever it was, it definately is not the hardware.
I have the impression that the issues happens after you transferred lots of data on that drive. No hangs when no big data has been added/removed or moved.
I thought i was going to get away with leaving snapshots in place, but alas no. The cleaner job that runs regularly as snapshots expire causes a serious drain on performance. so much so that PLEX and ZNC become completely inoperative for a while.
So I've now taken the perhaps extreme step of disabling all snapshots, and expunged all existing snapshots. It's easier than you think if you're had to wrestle with it before. :)
I turned off AV a long while back as it eventually caused DBus timeouts, and just never turned it back on. Given these performance issues in 6.4, I'm inclined to leave all the bells and whistles disabled for now. I am however leaving "bitrot" (COW) enabled. :) After all, without COW what's the point, really, of btrfs? ;)
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