Problem getting worse, slowness and locking up

[ehauk]

I never had a problem in 5 years, but since he 6.2 release (6.1.9 was fine) things have been dicey. The server is locking up at an increasing rate, and the gui always has slowness. It takes about 1 minutes to switch between tabs. During this time I checked the processes and everything looks good. When things become inaccessible shfs process takes up 100% cpu. I have included my diagnostic while it is happening along with a screen cap of the top procs. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

tower-diagnostics-20161115-1446.zip

[RobJ]

* Small issue - you have IDE emulation turned on for your onboard SATA drives.  When you next boot, go into the BIOS settings and look for the SATA mode, and change it to a native SATA mode, preferably AHCI if available, anything but IDE emulation mode.  It should be slightly faster, and a little safer.

 

* Minor issue - your motherboard BIOS is from 2009.  It's possible that a newer one would work better.

 

* Another very minor issue - I think you have 64MB reserved for graphics RAM.  Unless you are using the new boot GUI, unRAID only needs the minimum for a text console, so you might check in the BIOS if the RAM reservation for graphics use can be decreased.  That could give you a little more usable RAM.

 

* The previous unclean shutdown resulted in a parity check, which would be responsible for the slowness from boot (at 4:38pm) through the night until 5:24am, but not after that.

 

* The main issue seems to be that the user 'avahi' was not created, and it never stops trying to start and use the avahi background processes, then reporting numerous errors.  I do not know if this is causing slowness, but if it's shfs that is trying to use avahi, then that would explain it.  There are a couple of other users reporting the same error, "Failed to find user 'avahi'", so you might search for that as one of them seemed to find a fix for it.

[ehauk]

Thank you for the suggestions.

 

I changed it to AHCI in the bios.

 

I see "unknown username "avahi" in the message bus configuration file" when the array boots up. I'm still looking in to this one, but nothing obvious as to how to create that account or resolve the error.

 

The gui is still super slow even when a parity check is not in progress. Safe mode is the same way. I'm looking at the top processes and there is nothing taking up cpu time. Memory it low too. Less than 50%.

[ehauk]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I added these 2 lines to the /boot/config/passwd file, rebooted, and all good.

 

avahi:x:61:214:Avahi Daemon User:/dev/null:/bin/false

avahi-autoipd:x:62:62:Avahi AutoIP Daemon User:/dev/null:/bin/false

 

 

[RobJ]

I'm glad you found that, I was too tired at the time to go looking for it.  I did a search now, and was surprised by how many have been affected by it, so I created a FAQ entry based on what I learned:

 

  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=48508.msg515980#msg515980

 

Brit suggested the edit to the shadow file, and I'm PM'ing him for confirmation.