Balancing takes weeks to complete

Question

My RN204 running 6.05.01 with 3x 4TB and 1 2TB disk was running at about 80+% full between data and snapshots (even though I was only using about 4 TB for my data). I tried to do a balance, and after 3-4 days, it only got to about 6%, and the performance was abysmal.

I cleared out all my snapshots and and moved data around so that I was only about 25% full, and the balance took just minutes. Now I have a schedule to balance every other day.

It seems to me that balancing is pretty critical to BTRFS and it's capacity reporting and performance. Why is it not just run every day by default? I would expect that it would be pretty fast if it was run often.

mdgm-ntgr · Answer

Running it every day is way more than enough and unnecessary. Once a week at most should be sufficient.

If you never run a balance the filesystem may become quite unbalanced and the first subsequence&nbsp;balance may take a long time&nbsp;especially&nbsp;if the volume is quite full and the space is nearly fully allocated

StephenB · Answer

mdgm wrote:
Running it every day is way more than enough and unnecessary.&nbsp;

Agreed. &nbsp;I run it once a quarter, and it completes pretty quickly (the last one completed in 30 minutes). &nbsp;Perhaps start with once a week, and then try once a month and see if the completion time stays low.

Laserbait · Answer

I was doing the balance every month, but I have a lot of change data going to the RN204 (daily backups from my computers using Veeam with a 5 day retention), so in my case, I think the balance needs to be done more.

JennC · Answer

Hello Lasebait,
&nbsp;
You might want to see this article too:&nbsp;ReadyNAS OS 6: An overview of relevant scheduled maintenance tasks available
&nbsp;
Regards,

JohnRo · Answer

Hi&nbsp;Laserbait,&nbsp;

&nbsp;

We’d greatly appreciate hearing your feedback letting us know if the information we provided has helped resolve your issue or if you need further assistance.
If your issue is now resolved we encourage you to mark the appropriate reply as the “Accepted Solution” so others can be confident in benefiting from the solution. The Netgear community looks forward to hearing from you and being a helpful resource in the future!

&nbsp;

Thanks,&nbsp;

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Balancing takes weeks to complete

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