FreeBSD zfs timeout errors

Question

I have FreeBSD 8.2 with ZFS v28. 8 cpu core, 16Gb ram. Two disk drives (1.5Tb WD Green) on zfs mirror raid.

My system strangely uses memory. With alot of free (wired) memory it start to use swap and then doesn't clean it! Swap usage keeps growing. munin-graph swap

And then I see on my kvm this messages:

All file reads or writes seems very slow. When I use ssh and for example do nano /etc/rc.conf it pauses for 3-5 seconds before it works.

Will my disk drives die soon? Or is the problem elsewhere?

Answer 1

This looks like a hardware problem - either drives or controller. Since there are errors on both ad4 and ad6, it may be the controller. I recommend backing up any important data as soon as possible.

You might try installing sysutils/smartmontools to see if any SMART errors are reported.

As to your RAM usage, that seems strange. Even if you're using ZFS v28's dedupe, I wouldn't expect a 1.5TB filesystem to take up that much RAM. You might try running top -S -osize to see what is using the memory.