Was the RAM being used by the Arc?
Could you not pair it back?
iirc, it only limits to 50% by default, but can be extended or reduced as needed.
And I’m pretty sure it builds it’s tables each boot, rather than storing them for future, but will check that.
So lowering Arc limit, then a reboot and you should gain much RAM back, depending on how much you need
Didn’t know this was a thing, I’ll look into it. When I say I was doing nothing™ I did have a few things running, just not 8GB of RAM worth lol. Most of my systems I’ve run with ZFS have used more than average RAM. Something something free RAM is wasted RAM
Interesting, I’ll definitely look into that. My education on ZFS is slow going because of everything else going on, but I have several bookmarks (physical and digital) and some videos/lectures backlogged.
Ive run it on my current nas, originally with 2 GB of ram in total without issue.
I bumped the ram on it in 2013 to 10 gb total (yes, mismatched dimms and single channel, but its an old shitty AMD Turion anyway) and noticed very little difference for a single user NAS scenario.