# ZFS 'vfs.zfs.arc_meta_limit' ignored?



## jsiepkes (Apr 28, 2014)

Hi all,

I'm running a FreeBSD 10 (NanoBSD of an USB stick) host with no swap configured and 16GB RAM and it seems ZFS goes over its ARC metadata limits:


```
vfs.zfs.arc_max                         3221225472
vfs.zfs.arc_min                         369098752
vfs.zfs.arc_meta_used                   4466648368 <-- !!
vfs.zfs.arc_meta_limit                  134217728  <-- !!
```

This happens during a rather large `zfs send`/`receive` via `netcat`. After some time the system goes up in flames with errors like uid X, was killed: out of swap space.

I did some tweaking of  /boot/loader.conf.local and ended up with this (notice the large amount of kernel memory and small ARC size) to no avail:


```
vm.kmem_size="11G"
vm.kmem_size_max="11G"
vfs.zfs.arc_max="3G"
vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1"
```

Can anyone provide me with a hint as to what the problem might be?


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## jsiepkes (Apr 29, 2014)

I just did a test with FreeBSD 9 (instead of 10) and can confirm the same thing happens there.


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## User23 (May 7, 2014)

This may answer your question:

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi? ... freebsd-fs


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