On 3/18/2019 08:37, Walter Cramer wrote:> I suggest caution in raising vm.v_free_min, at least on 11.2-RELEASE
> systems with less RAM.? I tried "65536" (256MB) on a 4GB
mini-server,
> with vfs.zfs.arc_max of 2.5GB.? Bad things happened when the cron
> daemon merely tried to run `periodic daily`.
>
> A few more details - ARC was mostly full, and "bad things" was 1:
> `pagedaemon` seemed to be thrashing memory - using 100% of CPU, with
> little disk activity, and 2: many normal processes seemed unable to
> run. The latter is probably explained by `man 3 sysctl` (see entry for
> "VM_V_FREE_MIN").
>
>
> On Mon, 18 Mar 2019, Pete French wrote:
>
>> On 17/03/2019 21:57, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
>>> I agree. Recently I've found kind-of-workaround for this
problem:
>>> increase vm.v_free_min so when "FREE" memory goes low,
>>> page daemon wakes earlier and shrinks UMA (and ZFS ARC too) moving
>>> some memory
>>> from WIRED to FREE quick enough so it can be re-used before bad
>>> things happen.
>>>
>>> But avoid increasing vm.v_free_min too much (e.g. over 1/4 of total
>>> RAM)
>>> because kernel may start behaving strange. For 16Gb system it
should
>>> be enough
>>> to raise vm.v_free_min upto 262144 (1GB) or 131072 (512M).
>>>
>>> This is not permanent solution in any way but it really helps.
>>
>> Ah, thats very interesting, thankyou for that! I;ve been bitten by
>> this issue too in the past, and it is (as mentioned) much improved on
>> 12, but the act it could still cause issues worries me.
>>
Raising free_target should *not* result in that sort of thrashing.?
However, that's not really a fix standing alone either since the
underlying problem is not being addressed by either change.? It is
especially dangerous to raise the pager wakeup thresholds if you still
run into UMA allocated-but-not-in-use not being cleared out issues as
there's a risk of severe pathological behavior arising that's worse than
the original problem.
11.1 and before (I didn't have enough operational experience with 11.2
to know, as I went to 12.x from mostly-11.1 installs around here) were
essentially unusable in my workload without either my patch set or the
Phabricator one.
This is *very* workload-specific however, or nobody would use ZFS on
earlier releases, and many do without significant problems.
--
Karl Denninger
karl at denninger.net <mailto:karl at denninger.net>
/The Market Ticker/
/[S/MIME encrypted email preferred]/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4897 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL:
<http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20190318/4b2f3b9a/attachment.bin>