Hi all,
we are encountering severe problems on our X4240 (64GB, 16 disks)
running Solaris 10 and ZFS. From time to time (5-6 times a day)
• FrontBase hangs or crashes
• VBox virtual machine do hang
• Other applications show rubber effect (white screen) while moving
the windows
I have been tearing my hair off where this comes from. Could be
software bugs, but in all these applications from different vendors?
Could be a Solaris bug or bad memory!? Rather unlikely. I just was hit
by a thought. On another machine with 6GB RAM I fired up a second
virtual machine (vbox). This drove the machine almost to a halt. The
second vbox instance never came up. I finally saw a panel raised by
the first vbox instance that there was not enough memory available
(non severe vbox error) and the virtual machine was halted!! After
killing the process of the second vbox I could simply press resume and
the first vbox machine continued to work properly.
OK, now this starts to make sense. My idea is that ZFS is
blocking/allocating all of the available system memory. When an app
(FrontBase, VBox,...) is started and suddenly requests larger chunks
of memory from the system, the malloc calls fail because ZFS has
allocated all the memory or because the system cannot release the
memory quickly enough and make it available fo rthe requesting apps,
so the malloc fails or times out or whatever which is not catched in
the apps and makes them hang or crash or stall for minutes. Does this
make any sense? Any similar experiences?
Followup to my owm message. On the X4240 I have
set zfs:zfs_arc_max = 0x780000000
in /etc/system. Would it be a good idea to reduce that to say
set zfs:zfs_arc_max = 0x280000000
?? Hints greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Andreas
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