On 30/08/2025 03:46, Graham Perrin wrote:
…
pkg upgrade -fUy
a) failed at least once with 12 GB memory without tuning
b) succeeded at least once with 13 GB without tuning
c) succeeded at least twice with 2 GB, ARC tuned.
…
Temporarily set before (c):
sysctl vfs.zfs.arc.free_target=256000
Maybe preferable, an alternative to tuning the ZFS ARC:
vm.pageout_oom_seq=120
First test: 2 GB given to the VirtualBox guest, /boot/loader.conf used
for the tuning. Success.
Second test: 1 GB given, temporarily tuned in single user mode before an
exit to multi-user. Success.
Ref:
<https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-ports/2022-August/002459.html>
– again, thanks to Mark Millard.
The physical storage that I use for the virtual disks is slow, even when
connected to super speed USB (5Gb/s). An old StoreJet Transcend mobile
HDD. The varying slowness might explain why upgrades fails for me (pkg
killed, failed to reclaim memory) more often than for other testers.
During and after a simple ten-step upgrade from FreeBSD-ports:
grahamperrin@mowa219-gjp4 ~> zpool iostat Transcend 5
capacity operations bandwidth
pool alloc free read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
Transcend 777G 151G 36 65 4.01M 5.00M
Transcend 777G 151G 34 120 5.28M 9.44M
Transcend 777G 151G 79 80 8.04M 5.97M
Transcend 777G 151G 82 42 1.72M 3.99M
Transcend 777G 151G 166 18 3.23M 2.11M
Transcend 777G 151G 157 74 3.89M 5.59M
Transcend 777G 151G 64 91 4.48M 9.01M
Transcend 777G 151G 8 27 904K 2.27M
Transcend 777G 151G 0 18 16.0K 1.36M
Transcend 777G 151G 0 0 0 0
Transcend 777G 151G 0 0 0 0
Transcend 777G 151G 0 12 819 218K
Transcend 777G 151G 0 0 0 0
Transcend 777G 151G 0 0 0 0
Transcend 777G 151G 0 0 15.2K 0
Transcend 777G 151G 0 13 0 369K
Transcend 777G 151G 0 11 0 139K
Transcend 777G 151G 0 0 0 0
^C⏎
grahamperrin@mowa219-gjp4 ~ [SIGINT]> zfs version
zfs-2.3.1-1ubuntu2
zfs-kmod-2.3.1-1ubuntu2
grahamperrin@mowa219-gjp4 ~> lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 25.04
Release: 25.04
Codename: plucky
grahamperrin@mowa219-gjp4 ~>
