AS-304T disks go crazy busy at exactly midnight

[wyoung]

My AS-304T goes crazy busy spinning disks at exactly midnight every night.

It's busy enough that whatever I'm watching at the time will frame skip extremely badly for about 3-5 minutes.

When I log into the web interface during this time period, according to the "Process" tab in the "Activity Monitor", there is something called "nasmand" chewing up to 15% CPU time.

Does anyone know what the heck that is, and how to control it?

[crazynas]

Hi
can you check schedule something doing on midnight?
or contact support.asustor.com

[Elrique64]

I did a search for nasmand and didn't find anything in particular. Also looked for nasman since the "d" usually denotes a daemon in Linux. There were a few references to nasm, which is an assembly language compiler of some sort.

With WinSCP I opened the file (in text edit mode) and it appears to be some sort of notify app. I'm thinking it might be a "phone home" function for your DDNS to myasustor.com? I could be wrong, as I don't do assembly coding, but this is a quick guess. Clinton Hall or a few others here might know a little (or a lot) more about it.

As hard as this is to say, it appears crazynas might have actually gotten something right for a change, when he said to open a support ticket on this. It would be helpful to know what this app does, and if the NAS can run without it.

[wyoung]

Hi
can you check schedule something doing on midnight?
or contact support.asustor.com

Yeah, checking schedules was one of the first things I did.

I checked each of the disk schedules, but they're all set to do a once-a-month disk check at around 5am.

The network recycle bin is scheduled to do its thing at 7am each day.

[wyoung]

I did a search for nasmand and didn't find anything in particular. Also looked for nasman since the "d" usually denotes a daemon in Linux. There were a few references to nasm, which is an assembly language compiler of some sort.

With WinSCP I opened the file (in text edit mode) and it appears to be some sort of notify app. I'm thinking it might be a "phone home" function for your DDNS to myasustor.com? I could be wrong, as I don't do assembly coding, but this is a quick guess. Clinton Hall or a few others here might know a little (or a lot) more about it.

As hard as this is to say, it appears crazynas might have actually gotten something right for a change, when he said to open a support ticket on this. It would be helpful to know what this app does, and if the NAS can run without it.

I'll check a few more things, thanks to your and crazynas's suggestions.

Then I'll drop a line to asustor support after that to find out what's happening.

As hard as this is to say, it appears crazynas might have actually gotten something right for a change, when he said to open a support ticket on this.

That made me laugh

[Tsburt]

Mine have started doing this too on 302-T.... did you get a response from the Service Desk? What was wrong? Did it get fixed?

Thanks

[wyoung]

I've bundled the responses I got from support regarding my excessive disk churning...

nasmand's main function will check the related NAS configuration
Most of the time, it sleeps until some event to wake it up.
In the midnight, the nasmand will wake up to clean the expired user, backup the log, and " calculate the all the share size.
"clean expire user" and "backup the logs" will be completed very soon, but " calculate the all the share size" will take a little bit longer time.
That is why it cause "churning excessively at midnight.

After discuss with RD team, the time for this process can not be changed.
However we can provide a method to configure manually via the ssh connection.
This can be planned in the later firmware release ( not in ADM 2.4).

When it is released, I will let you know.

I wonder what the "calculate all the share size" actually refers to, and if that has much to do with the sheer amount of stuff I've got on the NAS now.

[wolvverine]

This problem is permanent on ADM 3.0

[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"