Cobia shouldn't have made it to the update train

[CheeryFlame]

This is the most terrible user experience I've ever encountered in years.

Everything is just so slow and rubbish. The interface is caching stuff, so for example in the apps list you'll have the wrong information shown until you press shift+F5. But refreshing on Cobia is a nightmare and will often keep you waiting on this

Oh and waiting years for the app list to refresh.

Not to forget that it's impossible to delete an app without restarting the server or unsetting app pool, deleting pvc manually and resetting the app pool. This is taking such a long time with 50+ charts.

Also these

And shall I not forget the never-ending logins

Almost forgot the annoyance of editing an app

Today I had to troubleshoot issues with applications and TrueNAS Cobia has delivered a sub-par experience.

What a waste of time.

I wish Cobia to be long forgotten and that the next time ix releases something, they actually make sure the basic of it is working.

If you're still on Bluefin and you're reading this, stay far away from Cobia. It's not ready.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Stay on CORE for production. Use jails wherever possible and Linux VMs where not.

 

[tannisroot]

Stay on CORE for production. Use jails wherever possible and Linux VMs where not.

This was not really a discussion of SCALE vs CORE really, but Bluefin vs Cobia.

 

[danb35]

I'll grant that the UI is slow--and with 28 cores available (in my case) and 128 GB of RAM, I really don't see why it should be. But no, it isn't (generally speaking) impossible to delete an app without rebooting. The only time I've run into cache-related issues was when I first updated to Cobia and the Bluefin UI was still cached--one refresh took care of that.

Timeout on the web UI is too short for you? Change it; this option is now in the UI in Cobia.

But hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good rant, I guess.

 

[Kris Moore]

Based on the massive numbers of folks who have upgraded to Cobia in the past 2-3 weeks, I'd go out on a limb here and say this is not a typical user experience. There's not enough real details here to properly investigate the root cause (Maybe file a bug ticket with debug file?) but if I had to hazard a guess, there is a clue in that it sounds like the middleware is running super slow setup. Without more details we can't be positive why, but with a proper bug ticket we can look into it. We've had a handful over similar reports over the year and more than a few of them were determined to be a boot-device on its last legs, slowing down everything and making middleware sluggish.

 

[CheeryFlame]

Based on the massive numbers of folks who have upgraded to Cobia in the past 2-3 weeks, I'd go out on a limb here and say this is not a typical user experience. There's not enough real details here to properly investigate the root cause (Maybe file a bug ticket with debug file?) but if I had to hazard a guess, there is a clue in that it sounds like the middleware is running super slow setup. Without more details we can't be positive why, but with a proper bug ticket we can look into it. We've had a handful over similar reports over the year and more than a few of them were determined to be a boot-device on its last legs, slowing down everything and making middleware sluggish.

Triple nvme parity on my boot device. Most of the people I've talked with on the Truecharts discord agrees that the app section is slow.

It's easy to reproduce.

Save an application without any modification and try to use the app UI. You can try to refresh but you'll end up hanging on on the screenshots in my first post.

Even worst save an application with dependencies like a cnpg database. Even even worst unset the pool if you've got many apps (50+ in my case) and set it back again. Or just reboot your server. You'll see what I mean in this topic.

I bet ix answer will be close to Truecharts isn't an officially supported catalog. Might be on paper but in reality one of their dev is working full time on ix apps and a lot of these apps are pretty much the same as the Truecharts version.

As for filing a bug ticket I already did before this post yesterday.

To be honest I believe that the Cobia release being slow with apps isn't a big deal. Bugs happen all the time and that's the way it works. Nothing here that can be resolved.

But while I'm here with Kris Moore engaging in my post, let me ask the real question. [OBFUSCATED] For me ix has always been the prime example of data integrity and ease of use. I understand why a 3rd party app catalog would have more apps, but not to the point of patching missing core functions from host. Our apps aren't safe and have never been. The new UI is better, yes, but it wasn't to be prioritized over backups.

 

[danb35]

Save an application without any modification and try to use the app UI. You can try to refresh but you'll end up hanging on on the screenshots in my first post.

Nope. It returns immediately to the list of installed apps, takes a few moments to re-deploy the app, and it's back.

Even worst save an application with dependencies like a cnpg database.

Again, I'm not encountering an issue.

I'm not denying that you're running into these issues, but you're presenting them as universal, which they demonstrably are not.

 

[egarcia]

I've found the exact same issues as OP, and although I agree maybe the inflammatory post was not very helpful, all issues are present on my system, freshly installed and with good hardware (Dell R730, 192GB RAM, 8 SSD, etc). I mentioned them in passing in my previous post https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/downgrading-to-bluefin.113007 and they are indeed related to TrueCharts on Cobia, so I'm not really sure where to report those issues.

 

[Arwen]

...
they are indeed related to TrueCharts on Cobia, so I'm not really sure where to report those issues.

Try this;
Users with questions or in need of support for TrueCharts should perform basic research on the website;

TrueCharts

Your Source for Awesome Helm-Charts!

truecharts.org

Then if needed, ask questions in the Discord channel;

Join the TrueCharts Discord Server!

Check out the TrueCharts community on Discord – hang out with 10894 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

discord.com

That's from this Resource;

Welcome to TrueNAS SCALE - Beginners Intro

Since mid 2021 we have had many new users of TrueNAS wanting to try SCALE. Here are some things that are helpful for new TrueNAS SCALE users to know; SCALE is a specialized & targeted OS based on a Linux distro. However, SCALE is NOT a Linux distro, and updates are by full replacement with a...

www.truenas.com

 

[egarcia]

Try this;
Users with questions or in need of support for TrueCharts should perform basic research on the website;

TrueCharts

Your Source for Awesome Helm-Charts!

truecharts.org

Then if needed, ask questions in the Discord channel;

Join the TrueCharts Discord Server!

Check out the TrueCharts community on Discord – hang out with 10894 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

discord.com

That's from this Resource;

Welcome to TrueNAS SCALE - Beginners Intro

Since mid 2021 we have had many new users of TrueNAS wanting to try SCALE. Here are some things that are helpful for new TrueNAS SCALE users to know; SCALE is a specialized & targeted OS based on a Linux distro. However, SCALE is NOT a Linux distro, and updates are by full replacement with a...

www.truenas.com

Thank you, I think I wasn't clear. What I meant was more or less "I'm not sure where the issue lies, so not sure who should fix it". I know how to perform basic research, thanks :).

 

[CheeryFlame]

The issue seems to be relying on Truecharts + Cobia since a majority of people on TC discord acknowledge what I'm saying here but everyone not using Truecharts does not.

Not surprised by their low effort reply. This is uncomfortable.

 

[Arwen]

Thank you, I think I wasn't clear. What I meant was more or less "I'm not sure where the issue lies, so not sure who should fix it". I know how to perform basic research, thanks :).

Great.

Sometimes it is hard to guess at a person's skill level, (and with TrueNAS). Here in the forums we use both post count and when a person joined the forum to make an educated guess. Which, sometimes is wrong. Or language barriers occur.

 

[egarcia]

I see, makes sense. Thank you for your post in that case, appreciate you taking the time to answer.

 

[danb35]

The issue seems to be relying on Truecharts + Cobia

...and just for the sake of further information, all but one of my apps are from Truecharts (Storj is the only iX app I'm using). So, while (again) I'm not denying that you're running into issues, nor that they may be widespread, they aren't universal, even with Truecharts apps.

 

[chuck32]

I'll grant that the UI is slow--and with 28 cores available (in my case) and 128 GB of RAM, I really don't see why it should be.

Make it 10 cores / 20 Threads for me, I'm experiencing the same issue.
Sometimes the UI is okay, sometimes the UI is really sluggish / lagging.

I just installed yesterday so I'll need some time to investigate everything.

I also stumbled upon some other odd things, like in the dashboard there are over 1Gbps as outbound traffic reported, however under reporting is shows the real number.

With that in mind and further testing / evaluation down the road I can understand you. When they bumped cobia as the recommendation for general I would have expected a different experience. However it seems stable, I don't use apps and after initial setup I don't plan on spending too much time in the web UI anyway.

 

[Kris Moore]

The issue seems to be relying on Truecharts + Cobia since a majority of people on TC discord acknowledge what I'm saying here but everyone not using Truecharts does not.

Not surprised by their low effort reply. This is uncomfortable.

View attachment 72400

Just to add my 2C to this. For somewhat obvious reasons we have to be careful with dealing with issues from 3rd party catalogs. This is why we have such a heavy disclaimer when you enable other catalogs:

I agree, it is annoying to you and other users when something isn't working while using TrueCharts. But look at it from our perspective. We can only support (and test) what we control. External things open up the door to all kinds of bad behavior's that we cannot account for all the time. We understand its an open-source product and people will do all kinds of "fun and creative" things with it, but we have to be very judicious about where we spend precious developers hours, and debugging issues caused or exposed by unsupported external entities is always going to be a challenge.

Similar story to the message from William about the scripting. A poor analogy is that it's like taking your car back to the dealer for an issue, after you've been replacing factory engine components with your own custom parts. We can only support the software as it was delivered since local modifications obviously run a high risk of breaking things in new and interesting ways.

Remember when you put on the "I Void Warranties" shirt, there is power, but also great responsibility that comes with it.

 

[danb35]

But look at it from our perspective. We can only support (and test) what we control.

Much as I'd like it to be otherwise, this is entirely understandable. But there's a counterpoint that I think you'd do well to seriously consider: TrueCharts has more apps than does iX. A lot more. I'd bet it's an order of magnitude more (edit: nope, not an order of magnitude--iX, including "community" apps, has 96; TrueCharts, including only stable apps, has 406). And since apps are really the only reason to be using SCALE over CORE at this point (it certainly isn't Linux' superior memory management, as my SCALE server wastes dozens of gigabytes of RAM), I think it's safe to say that you wouldn't have anywhere near the update of SCALE that you do have, were it not for TrueCharts.

IOW, it appears to me that you need TrueCharts at least as much as they need you, and possibly more.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Well said, Dan. The only reason for me to run SCALE are three apps I cannot run in jails. I used to run them in Ubuntu VMs with docker compose but thought I'd give SCALE a try.

Two of three are only available in TrueCharts. I'll be back to VMs should TrueCharts not be available anymore.

 

[LarsR]

@danb35 there was a post two week or so ago that stated iX considers it save to manually increase the arc_max to more then 50% with cobia.
See https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/increasing-scale-arc-size.113720/

 

[danb35]

@danb35 there was a post two week or so ago that stated iX considers it save to manually increase the arc_max to more then 50% with cobia.
See https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/increasing-scale-arc-size.113720/

Saw it, did it, but it doesn't work--ARC is still maxing out at half my RAM.