Current TrueCharts docs maintainer here. +1ing to this thread purely because I see some of the issues on my personal system as of DragonFish, but also because of the amount of people reporting on our Discord both the issues described and that limiting ZFS RAM usage to either 50% or 75% completely resolves the problem. We’re pointing people towards this thread.
Relevant SCALE specs include:
– AsRock Rack X470D4U2-2T
– AMD Ryzen 5 5600
– Nvidia Quadro P2000
– 64GB of DDR4 2400Mhz ECC RAM
– LSI 9207-8i SATA/SAS Host Bus Adapter PCIe card running in IT mode
– 8x WD Ultrastar HC550
– Multiple Samsung NVMe M.2 & SATA SSDs for OS & container data storage
My SCALE system’s usecase is mixed; it serves double duty as both an apps and NAS host, accessed primarily over the network via SMB.
Since upgrading from Cobia to DragonFish, I’ve observed the unresponsive GUI issues people have described, very poor responsiveness from the system, and other odd behaviour from the system but not to the extent that services/apps are being stopped or the system becomes unreachable.
Since DF released, the system has never gone below 2GB of RAM available to use. However, Swap usage slowly increases over time as seen in this album here. Missing portions in the graphs are from the Cobia → DragonFish upgrade and the reboot of my SCALE system I just did. You can also see a Dashboard view showing what typical system load looks like.
I’ve also observed since upgrading to DF that at times there is a lot of CPU usage from middlewared, as well as large amounts of “Iowait” on the CPU. Presumably from the low amount of RAM available for things in the system that aren’t ZFS. There are entire multi-hour periods of the day that I’ve observed the system being completely idle with apps and other services disengaged, including times I’ve not even been awake or using the system, with seemingly sporadically high amounts of middlewared CPU usage to the tune of 1-2 entire CPU cores.
My issues definitely aren’t as bad as other people’s, however in general DragonFish is a large regression in overall performance and efficiency compared to Cobia. It also doesn’t help that any time you have the web interface open, CPU usage automatically goes vertical until it’s closed again. I’m almost, not quite but almost, unable to use the Shell in the SCALE GUI after a few days of the system being running because it gets that slow. If I run ‘top’ in the Shell I can actually see parts of the window refreshing before others, that’s how sluggish the GUI is on what I’d class as a modern system.
Having to constantly CTRL + F5 a browser window because of SCALE’s GUI issues is painful enough as it is.
I can see some fixes/changes for 24.04.1 are in the pipeline, here’s hoping this release fixes the issues. The issues described in this thread and, to be honest, described elsewhere with DF, are exactly the same issues I’ve seen reported in various Jira tickets prior to DF’s release. These tickets either went unanswered for days, were closed due to it likely being a TrueCharts issue (clearly not the case) or otherwise ignored, sadly indicative of a larger overall trend in attitude that I’ve noticed on the part of iX post-Bluefin. I called out some of these issues as likely needing to be resolved prior to DF releasing, lest we run into issues soon after release.
Sure enough, approaching two weeks since DF’s release, and reports have been creeping up seemingly everywhere. I can’t help but think DF needed another week or two in the oven.