Hiya - hope someone can help. Here's a rough synopsis of my problems. I'm running a RN102 with OS 6.8.1 and a pair of 2TB WD Red disks in a domestic environment.
For a while now I've been having difficulties running virtual machines hosted on my RN102. Some days no problems, others the VMs would hang with write errors. This situation has got steadily worse, to the extent that I've moved the ones I use most often to my PC's SSD. Attempts to back up the VMs to the RN102 have also been a bit flaky.
File History has been more or less OK. Copying files of any size from the RN102 to my PC has been OK. Overnight backups from the RN102 to an external HD have apparently been OK. There are no errors recorded in the log files and both disks' SMART statuses are completely clean.
Howver, writes to the RN102 are now hanging after only a MB or so has been copied. After such a hang, the admin GUI becomes unresponsive.
I can still access the RN102 via SSH, but if I try to reboot the system from the shell command line the system hangs with the power light flashing.
If I run top from the shell command line I see btrfs-transacti consuming 90%+ of the CPU for up to 30 minutes at a time.
This feels like a hardware issue to me, but could it be a btrfs problem? The data volume is about half full and I defragged, balanced and scrubbed the file system a few months ago.
What should I do? I have an up-to-date backup of the RN102's data and configuration. Would my best course of action be a factory reset and data restore?
What should I do? I have an up-to-date backup of the RN102's data and configuration. Would my best course of action be a factory reset and data restore?
I think it's a reasonable (though painful) next step. You could also try running lifeguard on the disks in a Windows PC.
I may have found an interim solution. The folder containing the VMS was in the home share for my user. The home share also contained a copy of a windows.old folder that contained very many files. I made a new network share with bitrot protection and snapshotting turned off and moved the VMs to it, and also deleted the windows.old folder (which was well out of date).
Since then, everything seems to have returned to normal. I'm wondering if the combination of bitrot protection and a folder full of a large number of small files (only 18GB, but 70,000+ files) was too much for BTFRS and the RN102's weakish processor.
I'm wondering if the combination of bitrot protection and a folder full of a large number of small files (only 18GB, but 70,000+ files) was too much for BTFRS and the RN102's weakish processor.
I'm glad you worked around it. The RN102 also only has 512MB of ram, so that might also be a contributing factor.
