[OpenIndiana-discuss] Memory drains away....

[Robin Axelsson]

Yeah, for a period I had the system gobble up vast amounts of RAM while 
running Virtualbox. I tried capping the ARC (in some config file I 
believe, can't remember) but that didn't help. In the end I discovered 
that this happened when the virtual machines did network intensive tasks 
over a NAT connection and the problems disappeared when I switched to 
bridged networking. I filed a bug report and the Virtualbox team fixed 
the bug in version 3.2.12.

On 2011-11-04 16:41, Michael Stapleton wrote:
> Hello,
>
>      There is an issue running VirtualBox with ZFS. ZFS will cause
> fragmentation of memory which is usually not a problem, but due to the
> nature of how VirtualBox attempt to lock down continuous chunks of RAM,
> it is a problem for VBox. If you are running VBox and ZFS, cap the ARC
> cache...
>
>
> Mike,
>
>
>   On Fri, 2011-11-04 at 10:39 -0400, Daniel Kjar wrote:
>
>> I have seen that in plenty of places and I 'know' it to be true but as I
>> watch zfs swallow all of my ram and my server ends up stuttering (when
>> it shouldn't) then I have to do something.  Although everything
>> everywhere says that ZFS gives it up whenever asked many comments from
>> oracle and the zfs tuning guide hint that it isn't really that good at
>> giving it up.  Some processes don't know the right way to ask (exert
>> pressure) etc.  Also, when ZFS was young Sun kept saying that it using
>> all of the available ram was harmless but... later they figured out
>> there was a bug in how it was handling the process of detecting memory
>> constraints on the system and now there are known scenarios when
>> limiting ZFS hunger is called for.
>>
>> I was just hoping there was something else going on here with 151a but I
>> see now that is not the case.
>>
>> On 11/ 4/11 10:28 AM, Rob McMahon wrote:
>>> On 04/11/2011 13:13, Daniel Kjar wrote:
>>>> pmap seems to give me exactly what top tells me.
>>> Remember top will almost always show low free memory.  Free memory is
>>> wasted memory, it gets filled by filesystem cache, zfs or otherwise,
>>> and re-used when needed.  Look at e.g. `vmstat 5' to look for memory
>>> issues.
>>>
>>> Rob
>>>
>
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