Readynas 104 won't boot. Error 354 out_of_memory. After upgrade to 6.4.1 #26323717

If migrating the disks would help with this OOM error on boot issue, it would be from moving to a model such as the RN214, not to another RN104. I haven't seen any reports of a user trying this so don't know whether it would help. However even if this did resolve it, it wouldn't deal with the underlying cause that the system configuration and/or usage was not done in a way that is recommended.

I haven't seen any reports of this problem on models other than the 100 series.


Updating the firmware is a common requirement for escalating cases. If an agent escalated a case with a minor issue on old firmware then the case would likely be de-escalated again with the agent told to get you to update the firmware so that we can rule out encountering an issue that we have already fixed.

We have general advice on updating the firmware in ReadyNAS OS 6: Firmware Upgrade Guide and Tips which includes a suggestion to update your backup (which you should be doing regularly regardless of whether you update the firmware).

The Guide also mentions some common reasons why problems might be encountered:

• Systems that are completely full.
• Systems that have high filesystem fragmentation.
• Systems that have large quantities of hourly, daily, monthly snapshots.

The first and last of these should be easy for you to verify before you update the firmware. The middle one may usually (but not always) be somewhat related to the other two, but advanced users could get a good indication by looking at the metadata usage in btrfs.log. If the metadata usage is huge then this would suggest that the way the system was configured and/or used was far from ideal.

It appears that all systems encountering this problem are affected by one or more of the issues described in these bullet points. 

Some suggestions going forward would be to keep volume usage under 80%, run regular scheduled volume maintenance (defrag & balance) and to only use bit-rot protection and snapshots on shares which are suited to using those, not on every share.

Performance during a resync will be reduced. So if your volume is currently syncing you should test performance again once the sync completes.

It is important to note that the initial sync when creating a volume, is a special case when it comes to redundancy. During this initial sync if you have multiple disks and have chosen a redundant RAID option (e.g. the default X-RAID) then the volume is redundant throughout the initial sync.