Balance on 'mnt/cache' is running but not progressing

[randomusername]

I added a second cache drive to create a cache pool. Balance has been running for the last ~10 hours, initially it progressed, but for at least 8 hours it has been stuck at:

 

Balance on '/mnt/cache' is running
634 out of about 729 chunks balanced (635 considered), 13% left

 

Diagnostics attached, the logs look like the same commands are repeating over and over but I'm not sure how to interpret this.

 

Any help would be appreciated, I don't know where to go from here.

 

Edit: I'm on Unraid version 6.12.6

wessex-diagnostics-20240206-2216.zip

Edited February 7 by randomusername

[JorgeB]

Operation appears to be stuck in a loop, make sure pool backups are up to date and reboot, start the array, wait 5 minutes and post new diags.

[randomusername]

On 2/7/2024 at 8:57 AM, JorgeB said:

Operation appears to be stuck in a loop, make sure pool backups are up to date and reboot, start the array, wait 5 minutes and post new diags.

 

It might have been the wrong thing to do, but after a while I was concerned at the ~200 million writes on the cache disks so I clicked 'cancel' on the balance operation.

 

Since seeing your post, the array rebooted successfully, but predictably the balance operation did not continue (presumably because I had already cancelled it).

 

Diagnostics attached as you requested, but I'm guessing you will suggest clicking 'balance' again? And if so, should it be 'full balance', or 'convert to RAID1 mode'?

wessex-diagnostics-20240208-1505.zip

[JorgeB]

5 minutes ago, randomusername said:

but I'm guessing you will suggest clicking 'balance' again? And if so, should it be 'full balance', or 'convert to RAID1 mode'?

Do a balance to raid1 since currently there are multiple profiles, though probably the same thing will happen, if it does I would recommend backing up and re-formatting the pool.

[randomusername]

Thanks Jorge. It was exactly as you said, I did another balance to RAID1 but the same thing happened, so I backed up and reformatted using Squid's guide and now the balance status shows as:

btrfs filesystem df:
Data, RAID1: total=245.00GiB, used=243.63GiB
System, RAID1: total=32.00MiB, used=64.00KiB
Metadata, RAID1: total=1.00GiB, used=737.62MiB
GlobalReserve, single: total=288.52MiB, used=0.00B

btrfs balance status:
No balance found on '/mnt/cache'
 
Current usage ratio: 99.4 % --- No Balance required

 

So that all seems to have gone well. Thanks very much for your help.