Super low end test build - 4GB of ram?

[Greg_E]

I'm trying to build a test Freenas on an old Foxconn barebones I have sitting here. It really only needs to share a few files for this need, and maybe a tftp server for network switch/router firmware. Specs are an Atom 525D processor, and only 4GB of RAM (limit of 4gb total). Loading 11.2-u6 and it gave me a ram warning. For an extremely limited use case, do I have anything to worry about? Will it corrupt files or fail transfers?

The OS is installing now, and it's a very slow process until I know more. Don't want to go back down to version 9 because all my production servers are 11.x.

 

[HoneyBadger]

While ZFS itself has no "minimum RAM requirement" FreeNAS is an "appliance" and will probably not react well in the long-term to running on half the desired RAM. Results could range from swapping to disk (hurting performance) to just flat out crashing randomly under load.

For your limited needs, I'd consider deploying the old version; I used 9.10 for years personally.

 

[sretalla]

For an extremely limited use case, do I have anything to worry about? Will it corrupt files or fail transfers?

Be aware that the minimum RAM recommendation was increased to 8GB due to multiple reports of ZFS instability with lower amounts (i.e. 4GB).

ZFS instability may or may not be equivalent to "corrupt files or fail transfers". Up to you if you want to gamble on it.

 

[Greg_E]

I guess I should probably go back to version 9 then, I have a machine that ran it for around 3 years until the USB drive failed, when I got it working again I upgraded to 11. Its been solid since then.

 

[Greg_E]

Giving it a try on 11.2-u6. Copying a bunch of ISO files over from a slow USB hard drive and I'm seeing no swap in use, and just under 4gb of ram in use. The web interface is a bit bulky, but still responding. Only about a 50% average of CPU.

I forgot to mention that this has a single disk for the pool, that's all that fits. Booting off of an SD card. Not sure how much I'll torture this little machine, probably just leave it on my Cisco lab for now. I have a slightly more powerful machine with 8gb that I'll probably beat with my XCP-NG test lab, but again only a single disk.