ZFS has a cache algorithm which named ARC (Adaptive replacement cache). In general the ARC allocates as much memory as it is available.To prevent high memory usage, you would like to limit the ZFS ARC to xx GB, which makes sense to me (so you always have some RAM free for applications), please follow this documentation.
In theory,It’s a good feature that ZFS uses available memory to speed up slow disk I/O. But it also has some side effects, if the ARC consumed almost all free memory then application process ‘ll wait until ZFS frees up memory.So that means you ‘ll face with a performance problem.
That is why, we need to limit the total size with the zfs_arc_max kernel parameter.”
How to limit ZFS memory allocation?
For 10 GB = 1024 X 1024 X 1024 X 10
#vi /etc/system set zfs:zfs_arc_max=10737418240
You should limit the ZFS ARC becasue of memory usage. I recommend to set it %12 rate of total memory. For UFS it set %12 by default.
- How to find ARC Cache and check server memory usage
#kstat -p zfs:0:arcstats | head -4</p> #kstat -n arcstats -s size module: zfs instance: 0 name: arcstats class: misc size 26505807808 >> 26GB ARC Cache
#echo ::memstat|mdb -k ZFS File Data 3657908 28577 22%
