Disk I/O in Activity Monitor

[zurk]

Nice graphs like the CPU utilization for Disk utilization would be nice. Mine seems to be idle until you look at the disks which are 100% saturated with reads/writes.

[MikeG.6.5]

This would be a great idea.

It was brought up a long time back...It would seem that a lot of our input hasn't been taken for some of the updates Asustor has done in the past. We can still hope, though.

[peixoto1970]

+1

[billsargent]

Nice graphs like the CPU utilization for Disk utilization would be nice. Mine seems to be idle until you look at the disks which are 100% saturated with reads/writes.

I compiled iotop for mine, and noticed that nasmand and stormand are using a lot of disk io but for me, it only happens after midnight as though it is some kind of scheduled maintenance but it runs on into the next day unless I reboot it.

But yes, io graphs would be very nice. Iotop doesn't report the disk reads/write corretly though because they've left some stuff out of the kernel. So at this point, all i can see with iotop is just IO, and not reads/writes per process.

[wolvverine]

Yes , it is problem with nasmand process.
Look on:

killall nasmand && strace -f nasmand

showed many operation:
stat, fstat, lstat, fstatat, newfstatat,getdents
on every file/directory on RAID.
And depending on the amount of GB on the disk it can take several hours (1GB = 1h)
Asustor team did not explain why this indexation of all files serves.
And why they do not want to allow configuration at which point this indexation will be performed, it is hard coded at 24:00.

The read operartion is in peek to 6-8 MB/s. Average 1,2 MB/s


"According to our software team, yes, the nasmand daemon will do the housekeeping works of NAS during the midnight. When it finishes the job, I will enter the sleep mode automatically"
"house keeping , like check account expiration , and check log file usage...etc
the app is a daemon without any user interface, the check start time & frequency are hard coded in app itself"
"After checking with the software team, the process will be respawn automatically"

[billsargent]

Yes I figured it out after awhile. I had plex installed on the NAS which creates millions of tiny files for each video you have imported into it... thumbnails, metadata etc... And it was indexing those. And sometimes it would still be doing it 6 or 8 hours later. I had to uninstall plex. It still takes awhile for it to do its "house keeping" but not as long as before.

[MikeG.6.5]

Those thumb nails Plex makes are optional, and I don't recommend anyone with less than a 700X series to have them made during import of the video. Generating these preview files can really impact the performance of the lower ended CPU's in the other models.

You can change the behavior of this in the Plex Web App by going to each library and turning off the check mark under Library -> Edit -> Advanced -> Enable video preview thumbnails. If you want to have them, but only want them made during lower usage times go to the Web App -> Settings -> Scheduled Tasks -> and change the start and stop times to something that is more in-line with the NASes lower usage times. (I have mine set for 2AMto 5AM.) You can further change if they are made when media is added by changing the settings in the Web App -> Settings -> Library -> Generate video preview thumbnails and selecting the option you want for those listed. ("Never", "As a scheduled task", or "As a scheduled task and when media is added.")

These previews are only really used when scrubbing (fast forward or reverse) and is only supported with just a handful of client apps. Or if you use PlexPy to monitor other people's usage. It will show you where they are in the movie or TV show in near RT.

[billsargent]

Well it's more than just thumbnails. It's also metadata. Just deleting the folder (from the command prompt and directly on the nas) it took hours. Plex really needs to switch to a real database system that doesn't use files for metadata... but instead uses sqlite or something else.

[MikeG.6.5]

Well it's more than just thumbnails. It's also metadata. Just deleting the folder (from the command prompt and directly on the nas) it took hours. Plex really needs to switch to a real database system that doesn't use files for metadata... but instead uses sqlite or something else.

Uhm... Plex DOES use SQLite for it's DB. Check out the Plex forums for more info...

[wolvverine]

another answers from Asustor support :
"We are sorry that we don't no further suggestion for you after long correspondance.
According to your picture, the daemon uses less than 900KB/s and not continuously when it's doing housekeeping job.
NAS is multi-task system, the job only takes few of system resource and generally it won't affect system performance." - peek to 8Mb

"That's a instant i/o rate it's not a continuous i/o as explained earlier. the job won't take all i/o resources and won't last too long" - 3h for 3GB

"if so, I am sorry to let you know we can do nothing for your application. " - Example for this case - kodi on asustor NAS freeze playing movies that is when doing "housekeeping work" the moovies played at that time start slowing down and freezing. This situation repeats all the time after midnight.

"In the chart, you can see the max I/O is than 1MB/s , and not a continuous I/O. The average I/O will be lower than this rate. and the housekeeping work shouldn't last long"

The asustor supprot are not able (or dont' want) to find the solution to make possible to configure the starting time of "the housekeeping work" (ex. not after midnight but during the day).