[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS backup box hanging regularly

[Lauri Tirkkonen]

On Tue, Oct 27 2015 09:49:40 +0100, Jim Klimov wrote:
> So far I use a mix of 'standard' time-slider and additionally my script that kills oldest snapshot groups (chosen by pattern of automatic snaps) to keep a specified watermark of free space.

Yeah, we were previously using zfs-auto-snap from OpenSolaris before it
became time-slider (with one or two local patches). 

> Something in this simple activity is enough to bring the box down into swapping until the deadman knocks to interrupt the infinite loop looking for a free page, and I've got a screenshot to prove this theory ;)

In your previous mail you have a 'top' listing with way too many 'zfs'
processes owned by zfssnap, and all are hundreds of megabytes in RSS.
That sounds like a problem. IIRC, one problematic configuration that
caused issues like this was a single filesystem setting a
zfs-auto-snapshot property locally in a large tree where it also
inherited it from the parent. My memory on this is a bit hazy though.

> I wonder why doesn't the offending process die on some failed malloc...

Good question.

-- 
Lauri Tirkkonen | lotheac @ IRCnet