Can Snapraid make the whole system unresponsive?

  • Hi,


    I just tried to run a snapraid sync for the first time (from the control panel, and it got as far as scanning the second disk, after which I received a "communication failure" popup. The server also didn't react to console inputs, ssh, or smb access.


    I rebooted (using the hardware button) and tried again, this time from the console, the result is the same:


    Zitat

    Self test...
    Loading state from ...
    Scanning disk Data1...
    Scanning disk Data2...


    I noticed that the HDD led is still on, and I have to admit to having an obscene amount of small files on that disk (~800 GB in 600k Files in 100k folders).


    Can it be that Snapraid is just traversing the disk? Do I have to start it "nice"? In my experience, linux doesn't get unresponsive just because of one process. However, I currently only have 2GB Ram, this might be a bottleneck.

  • It's normal that it takes a lot of time when there are many small files. Just let it finish. Only the first sync should be long.


    If those small files change often, then you might want to exclude the folder that contains them.

  • Can it be that Snapraid is just traversing the disk? Do I have to start it "nice"?

    If you want to have a clue what's going on you could 'apt install sysstat iozone3 ionice lsof' and then use 'iostat 5' in a separate shell to see whether Linux is stuck in IO (then it can become absolutely unresponsive, watch the %iowait value), the other tools are there to test/check for performance and open files and with ionice you could try to avoid bein stuck in IO a little bit.


    Since I'm using OMV on very slow devices I use btrfs + snapshots + incremental sending the snapshots to another disk/host. Pretty much same results as snapraid without any IO load.

  • Thanks for the replies. I will just let it continue. Now I wish I hadn't pushed the reset button this morning after it ran for the night...


    If it's only so slow one time, it's OK. It's a large amount of files, but it's all the photos, documents etc. I collected over 20 years. So in the future the growth will be quite slow.


    Talking about snapraid, am I right in thinking that if I want it to sync regularly, I have to use "Scheduled jobs" and add a weekly "snapraid sync" command? Does it make sense to invoke it with "nice -n 15 snapraid sync"?

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