How much RAM do I need for my FreeNAS?

[Nagi]

Hello, I have a question: How much RAM do I need for my FreeNAS?

I have 3TB of storage, Intel Core i5-6500, 8GB of ram and running everything from a USB Stick.

Im also running Pihole and a Plex Server on the same computer. I'm asking because  when I look at the dashboard, I see that I never have some Ram to spare.

 

Thanks for the help! Im still new when it comes to Freenas :)

[Windows7ge]

Memory that ZFS is using for cached data is known as ARC. This is data in memory that is ejectable. If the system needs more RAM it will remove data from the ARC cache. This is perfectly fine.

 

If you ever get into 10Gbit networking you can benefit from even more RAM but as it stands unless you Services take over all of the ZFS cache then you don't need more RAM.

[HermannTheGerman]

On 3/6/2020 at 1:16 PM, Nagi said:

How much RAM do I need for my FreeNAS?

All of it.

 

Freenas will always fill up your RAM, no matter how much you throw at it because it uses it for caching as Windows7ge described. That's isn't a bad thing since empty memory is essentially wasted memory.

 

As a rule of thumb your freenas box should have 1GB of RAM per TB of physical hard drive space but no less than 8GB.

[2FA]

1 hour ago, HermannTheGerman said:

As a rule of thumb your freenas box should have 1GB of RAM per TB of physical hard drive space but no less than 8GB.

That is only for deduplication, not FreeNAS in general.