On Sat, 8 Feb 2014, T L wrote:

> How full is the pool?

media            16T  6.6T  9.0T  43% /usr/local/media

> How much RAM does the system have?

16 GB

> Are the ZFS options for de-duplication or compression turned on?

I don't remember exactly what I did... forgot how to check, I'll look it 
up later.

> Are you using a L2ARC cache?

I don't think so, again have to look up what that is, but preliminary 
seems like probably not.

> If you have any 4k drives, are the filesystem partitions aligned optimally
> (ashift=12 maybe)?

I actually checked that a few months ago when I was having REALLY horrible 
performance. Ended up rebuilding the pool in a totally different way and 
even though my drives should NOT need that parameter, I used it anyway 
just in case. Performance was fabulous until very recently.

There's only one "partition" in the pool. It's two raidz1 pools with four 
3tb drives each.

> 
> Thomas
> 
> On Feb 8, 2014 11:09 AM, <tclug at freakzilla.com> wrote:
>       Hello people,
>
>       Alright, my RAID/ZFS drama continues. The thing was working
>       perfectly for a few months, and now performance has turned
>       abysmal. It's a 16TB array running as a media server. If there's
>       one client streaming data, no problem. Even two. But add a bunch
>       of little things accessing the pool and it crawls. You hit Play
>       on a video and there's a 5 second delay before starting. Skip a
>       music track, again, 5 second delay. Kinda risiculous, right?
>
>       No errors anywhere, zpool srub found nothing wrong, etc. The
>       server's load average, though, is always super high (like >4,
>       sometimes up to 6), a lot of waiting for IO.
>
>       The only idea I have is that using the system's built-in SATA to
>       run eight 3tb harddrives is not able to keep up with demands. So
>       I'm thinking of getting a nice SATA expeansion card to off-load
>       some of the processing off the CPU, hopefully that'll help.
>
>       So, a couple questions:
>
>       1. Can anyone think of any other reason the filesystem is
>       suddenly acting
>          like this? It was fine when there was less data on it.
>
>       2. I feel it should be seemless to move the ZFS pool/drive array
>       from one
>          SATA connection to another. I this correct? The array uses
>       two separate
>          SATA connections, but I figure worst case I plug them in in
>       the wrong
>          order, it fails, I reverse them and restart and no problem.
>       Is this
>          true? I don't want to nuke my ZFS pool...
>
>       3. Can anyone recommend a good SATA card with e-SATA ports? I
>       have one
>          that came with the drive enclosure but it is not Linux
>       compatible.
> 
>
>       Thanks!
>       _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
>