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BTRFS is killing my NAS
I'm having major issues with btrfs in ReadyNAS. Every once in a while it just kills my NAS to a point where even typing SSH commands is very sluggish. Web UI and shares are not accessible. I've read everything I could on the Internet (about balancing, defrag, etc) and have been doing the recommended maintenance. However, once the problem starts, I can't find a way to stop btrfs, whatever it's trying to do. It's a chicken-and-egg situation: to fix the problem, I need my system usable, but the problem makes it unusable.
I'm not a newbie and work with Linux professionally. I really regret buying ReadyNAS, not knowing it forces btrfs without an option to use a reliable file system instead. I don't care so much for the fancy features and snapshots if it can't deliver the basic functionality. Sometimes I don't even care about the data (it's mostly unimportant in my home environment), I just want the system back usable without having to go through factory reset every few months.
Does anyone have any suggestions how to kill btrfs-transacti and related processes after it's stuck? Or tell btrfs to throttle down whatever it's trying to do?
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- Which firmware are you running?
Have you disabled quotas at the volume level?
How full is your data volume?I'm running 6.8.1. I never enabled quota but reading forums it seems like it might have been enabled automatically by a certain firmware update. As part of the troubleshooting (and desperation), I pulled the plug and was able to log in via SSH, which was responsive despite btrfs-transacti process starting to eat up CPU. I had pulled the plug before - the system usually worked for a few minutes before stalling again. So this time I immediately issued this:
btrfs quota disable /data
It's been 15 minutes so far and I don't see any btrfs activity - all services are available.
Now that I can actually access the system, I looked at the GUI logs. The last entry is from snapshot prune worker from 11/2 23:19, the next message is from today when I restarted it. Logs in journalctl indicate there was an out of memory condition around that same time.
Here the output of some btrfs commands.
btrfs fi df /data Data, single: total=3.84TiB, used=3.47TiB System, DUP: total=32.00MiB, used=672.00KiB Metadata, DUP: total=3.00GiB, used=1.74GiB GlobalReserve, single: total=485.88MiB, used=2.91MiB root@NAS:~# btrfs fi show Label: '0e35c581:data' uuid: 07dfdef1-b26e-474a-b2ca-42a55738cb01 Total devices 1 FS bytes used 3.47TiB devid 1 size 4.54TiB used 3.85TiB path /dev/md127 root@NAS:~# df -h /data Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md127 4.6T 3.5T 1.1T 76% /dataWhat is the best approach now to do any necessary btrfs maintenance? I had a monthly defrag which I disabled for now. I'm afraid to run balance as I had bad experience with it in the past (system locks up).
- There is a GUI option to disable volume quotas and also an OS Re-install will disable volume quotas.
Volume maintenance should be scheduled during times where the NAS is being used lightly. Likewise with backups (obviously at a different time to volume maintenance).
Your volume usage is approaching the point where it would be a good idea to free up some space or expand the volume.
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