I am running unRaid 6.7.2 in a 24 bay Supermicro chassis.  I am having alot of trouble with the IO wait stat climbing to 20, sometimes 50+.  Whenever this happens, unRaid becomes so slow that it is unusable and then I have to start turning apps off.  I bought the server with 16Gb of ram, I went ham and filled it up with 64Gb of Ram.  It's a dual CPU board, the Xeon's are about 5 years old but the CPU benchmarks showed together they were comparable to the i7-4790k CPU that I had in my old server, so I thought it would be fine.  In an effort to save power, I put the docker image and the appdata on the cache drive, which is an SSD (I feel I may be working it too hard).

 

Therefore, i'm looking for some advice:

1) Are my dual Xeon's powerful enough (I think they are, the CPU load is not usually over 2-3 consistently (I think it goes up to 20 (in top)).

2) Am I using all my Ram.  Was there something I needed to do when i added the extra Ram (I'm not sure it's being used).

3) Should I make a ramdisk?  I've seen mention of this but I don't know how to do it and do I have enough Ram to do it?

4) I put a 1050ti video card in the server, but i'm not sure it's working as I didn't get any video out of the HDMI or DVI output (didn't try the display port output).  (is there anything I need to do to make it work?)

 

Notes:

a) I know disks 8, 10, 12, 16, 19, 20 have smart errors, I track these closely and the errors are not increasing.  I only use these drives for movie/TV show shares so if they die and I cannot recover the array, I won't lose my personal backups.  I understand the risks, please don't focus on telling me to replace these drives.

b) I did have the drive spin down set to 15 minutes, this caused ALOT of IO wait issues.  I have changed this to 6 hours and while it helped immensely, I still have IO wait issues with all drives spun up.  Actually the drives rarely spin down with a 6 hour delay.

 

Attached are the diags for my server.  

 

Many THANKS for taking the time to look!

 

tower-diagnostics-20191126-1216.zip

Possibly related to this, fixed on v6.8 currently on rc.

 

 

Thanks.  I will install RC7 now.  This has been driving me mad.  I only recently got this server and I was starting to feel like I made a bad purchase even though it's far superior to what I had.  

 

Still would like some help with 2), 3) 4) if anyone is up for it.

1 hour ago, nerbonne said:

3) Should I make a ramdisk?  I've seen mention of this but I don't know how to do it and do I have enough Ram to do it?

Unraid runs from RAM.   Any path that is not under /mnt/disk*, /mnt/cache or /mnt/disks/* is automatically in RAM so no need to explicitly create a RAM disk.   As to whether you have enough RAM that depends on what you want to store on it.

I have installed 6.8.0 RC7 and have all my apps running, mover running, and i'm able to use plex.  This is a big improvement as before I would have had to stop a few apps to use plex and the mover would definitely have killed it.  Thanks so much.