Parity Sync Issues

[wishie]

Hi guys,

 

Ive been using unRAID for quite a few years, and have suffered drive failures before and replaced them without issue. Recently though, my Parity drive reported as 0b in size and then stopped working all together. I removed the drive, put in the new replacement, and started a Parity-Sync... I came back a bit later to check on the progress and found the computer had basically locked up. There is no monitor or keyboard attached, but I couldn't access the Web UI anymore, or SSH in. I connected a monitor and keyboard to the machine, and tried again, this time running 'top' to watch things like CPU/RAM usage etc.. Once again, the machine locked up (around 48 minutes into the Parity-Sync).

 

Now, this machine has 2Gb of RAM, but 512Mb of that is assigned to the GPU and there is no way to change that in the UEFI/BIOS sadly. So, unRAID has 1.5Gb of RAM available. So, to try and rule out 'Out of memory' issues (because we all know Linux does some comical things when it runs out of memory) I created a 4Gb swap file on my cache drive.

 

So, I booted the machine, clicked "Start Array" to mount all the disks, ssh in a did 'swapon /mnt/cache/4Gb.swapfile' and run top to confirm its there. There is now swap, but unRAID is using NONE of it.. Sometimes I've seen it use 1mb or so, but barely any.. while the RAM is very very full.. I checked the 'swapiness' which is at a default of '60' like most other distros...

 

So, basically, I have 2 questions:

 

1) Why isn't the swap being used?

2) Do you think I'm on the right track with 'out of memory' issue for the Parity-Sync to fail?

 

Note, I have just spent almost 21hrs doing a 'preclear' of this drive, and it has 0 errors.

 

Should I perhaps boot the machine up again, run 'top' on one tty, and 'tail -f /var/log/syslog' on another tty?

[sureguy]

What plugins or addons are you running?  1.5GB of RAM should be more than enough for unRAID as long as nothing else is running.  Regarding swap memory, Linux won't use it unless it's necessary AFAIK, but will fill actual ram by caching things and swapping out when necessary.  See http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

[wishie]

The only plugin is "Dynamix webGui" which is a default one, isn't it?

 

I do have Docker and 2 containers, but I disabled that to save memory.

 

So far after the preclear, the Parity-Sync has been running for 2hrs without crashing.. this is the longest time yet.. I hope it keeps it up.

 

Ive decided to replace this mess of onboard and CPI controllers with an M1015 (LSI 9211) controller too.. thats unrelated, but yeah

 

[Frank1940]

From what I have been reading, your 1.5GB of memory is very close the absolute minimum required to run version 6.  (You have to understand that determining exactly how little memory is actually required is extremely difficult and many software companies actually understate it so they can sell more units!)  Your system may have run fine under version 5, but that is not a guarantee that it will do so with version 6.  For starters, 64 bit software has a larger memory footprint than 32 bit but it does handle larger amounts of memory (>4GB) more gracefully and has features that provide greater protection against crashes of the base OS. But all of this comes at a price and one of those is the need for more memory.

 

Unless you enjoy being a guinea pig, I would suggest that you upgrade your memory as you are doing your other upgrades. 4GB should be more than enough for running a couple of dockers.

 

EDIT:  To the best of my knowledge, unRAID does not use a hardware 'swap' disk.  Everything is kept in memory.  The Flash drive is only accessed on bootup and only a few configuration files are written to it by user via the GUI.  The only time that unRAID OS writes to the Flash is a file that indicates that the array was successfully stopped prior to shutdown.

[wishie]

32 minutes to go on this parity sync!

 

 

But yeah, ill grab some more RAM and the M1015.. that should sort out a few issues.

 

Thanks