Defrag Running for Days! #23600598

Open a support case at my.netgear.com

Post your case number in this thread.

If you could attach your logs to your case that would be good.

Case opened - reference number is 23600598

How do you use your device?
My defrag of 18TB on 716X took about 24 hours to run last time I looked... but that's a 716X on 6X4TB RAID5. If you have a lot of files on your device and there is a lot of fragmentation on those files, it could take a long time to run (depending on how the device is used during defrag). You can download your logs and look under the process log to see if btrfs defrag is running.

At the time the logs were downloaded yesterday the defrag was still running.

The data volume is about half full.

The configuration is quite close to mine. RN104 with 4*4Tb raid 5 single volume, 55% space used. Mine takes less than two hours to defrag (1H23min according to logs). That said it is defragged regularly so there is nothing to do really. I think the rebuild time is between two and 3 days with an idle device, I would expect defrag to be completed in less than 5 days, specially if volume has free space to work with. Of course intensive use will slow the defrag.

Do you have SSH enabled ? if so, can you check the "top" command. I'm curious to see your %wa. If you have something like 40-60 %wa that's normal for defrag, if your are up to 90-95% something is wrong IMO as you should have the find command searching files and consuming CPU time too. Mine has between 20 and 70 %WA while defragging (I guess 70% when hitting a big file, 20% for small files, 50% most of the time).
If this is not enabled, is you web interface slow ? if you try to copy let's say a 1Gb file what is the speed ?
You may also check if you have nothing else using your CPU (torrent clients are a bad idea while defragging for example since they are creating fragmented files every second).

MikeB666 and xeltros do you use snapshots?

I do use snapshots yes. Daily for some shares, weekly for others. That said I had no substantial data moves for a while now (except Time Machine and maybe 10Gb of files this month).
I asked about the %wa as I had the problem back to 6.1.4 I think (not sure) with big files, the NAS was freezing and had to be rebooted electrically to work properly and I was having those really high %wa like if the NAS was waiting for the disks. The next version patched it up though.
This also reminds me that there were BTRFS updates with 6.1.4, I reset my NAS to get them applied and I believe some of the improvements concerned stability. @Mike did you do a factory default after upgrading to 6.1.4 ?

Here is Mike's initrd.log

[2014/07/08 15:03:37] Factory default initiated due to new disks (no RAID, no partitions)!
[2014/07/08 15:03:47] Defaulting to X-RAID2 mode, RAID level 5
[2014/07/08 15:04:15] Factory default initiated on ReadyNASOS 6.1.4.
[2014/07/08 15:12:46] Updated from ReadyNASOS 6.1.4 (1382402794) to 6.1.8 (1398980083).

So yes he did last do a factory default on 6.1.4. It was what the NAS shipped with. I would have recommended a factory default after the firmware update to 6.1.8 on a new setup, but it's a bit late for that now.

OK so a couple of points.

The reply from the support case is
"...
Hi Mike,
It is only normally it will take that long for the disk defragment since you have 5.02TB data on it. Please check it again if the defrag is still not finished after another week.
..."

So the implication is a two week defrag time !!!

Also - are we really expected to do a factory reset after a firmware upgrade which will wipe the disks, seems a little harsh. I could do this as I have an identical 104 backing up this one - a case of military purchasing "why have one when you can have two at twice the price".
So could factory default the box and then rewrite the 5TB of data to it from the other ReadyNAS.
Is it believed that this will really make any difference - since the disk were bare when written too first time around and it was done in mostly one massive write session to back up another real file server (massive number of files from small, a few KB, to 60GB in size).

Mike

Also no snapshots in use.