Checked the disk rather than waiting on comfy-dev. Both builds are there,
pulled a minute apart on Aug 23: a 26 GB int8 and a 15 GB nvfp4-awq.
I had asked whether their nvfp4 pin was set under a Blackwell assumption,
since Ada has no native nvfp4, which would make the int8 file the right
one on the new box. It cannot be. They pinned it on irv-ml1's A6000,
which is Ampere sm_86 and has neither native nvfp4 nor native fp8. Ada
sm_89 supports a strict superset, so a pin that was correct on the weaker
card cannot be invalidated by moving to the stronger one. The migration is
incapable of breaking it.
The pin is about VRAM, not architecture. Eleven gigabytes on a 48 GB card
that also holds a DiT and two VAEs decides whether a graph runs, and a
text encoder runs once per prompt rather than once per diffusion step, so
its throughput matters far less than the DiT's. That also explains why
this pin went the opposite way from their other one without either being
inconsistent. The RTX 6000 Ada is also 48 GB, so nothing relaxes.
Reclassified the 26 GB int8 from orphan to spare: with the extra drives
the destination lands near 14% full, so disk stops being the constraint
and the pin-rot argument says keep it. Question withdrawn to comfy-dev.
Operator asked whether 512 GB justifies a ramfs for hot models, then
self-corrected toward ARC with a 128 GB cap.
- No ramfs/tmpfs tier. ARC is the same cache done adaptively: no curated
hot-list to rot, no boot-time copy-in, and the memory comes back under
pressure. Neither tier beats the host-to-VRAM PCIe hop anyway, so the
warm-load time is identical.
- 128 GB is below the OpenZFS Linux default of 50% of RAM, so doing
nothing already gives 256 GB. Recommend ~320 GB, not past ~75%.
- Recorded the one honest argument for tmpfs: safetensors mmap gets
double-buffered on ZFS-on-Linux, so a checkpoint can cost ~2x. Sized
for, not architected around.
- Flagged that this is not the idle-VRAM-is-reserved case: arc_max is a
ceiling on an elastic cache, not a preallocation.
- recordsize=1M cannot be won through zfs send, since recv reproduces the
source's block structure. Not worth losing incremental send over; the
128K cost on flash is metadata overhead, not throughput.
Memory-only; no version bump per the SemVer SKIP list.
Six drives fills all eight bays, which turns a capacity top-up into a
one-shot build decision. Recorded because the reasoning survives whatever
he picks:
- raidz2 over mirrors. Workload is large sequential reads of safetensors,
ARC fronts it, SSD resilver has no seek penalty, and "expand two at a
time" is meaningless once every bay is full. raidz2 survives any two
failures; 4x mirrors dies to an unlucky pair.
- Buy 8, not 6. A raidz vdev caps every member at the smallest, so the
two as-bought 1.92 TB drives would cap all eight and put two used
drives of unknown endurance inside the parity set.
- Drive size is now the permanent ceiling. SAS/SATA backplane, all bays
full, and the free-PCIe-slot inventory is still unpulled.
Runway table included with an explicit caveat that the growth rate is
projected off one acquisition batch, not measured.
Memory-only; no version bump per the SemVer SKIP list.
comfy-dev's disk-vs-catalog diff and a recount of my own figures both
landed on this thread. Two numbers were wrong and both were headed for
the operator's sizing conversation.
- My ~90% was a double-count. I read ALLOC 1.45T while their pull was
running and then added the full ~112 GB on top; most of it was already
in that reading. "Onboarded" is not "landed". Settled payload is
~1.47 TiB and the as-bought mirror lands at 84%, not 90%.
- comfy-dev's "pruning gets us nearer 45%" is the striped figure. On the
as-bought pair mirrored, deleting all ~215 GiB of unreferenced weights
still lands at 72%, with ~140 GiB of runway on a store that took on
~100 GiB in one day. The constraint is vdev layout, not payload — a
1.75 TiB pool stays 1.75 TiB whatever goes in it.
- So the prune audit and the drive purchase are independent decisions
and neither gates the cutover. Presenting them to the operator that
way rather than as a trade.
Also recorded: pool arithmetic (1.75 / 3.49 / 3.57 TiB), the mirror-vdev
smallest-member gotcha if the new drives get paired one-each with the
1.92s, comfy-dev's 34 GiB of uncatalogued LTX 2.5, and an open question
back to them on whether the H3 encoder's nvfp4 pin was set under a
Blackwell assumption that sm_89 does not satisfy.
Memory-only; no version bump per the SemVer SKIP list.
Measured irv-ml1's storetank against the R750xa's as-bought drives while
answering comfy-dev's "does the Ada box have ZFS?" question.
- storetank: 1.81 TiB pool, 1.45 TiB used, 80% CAP already, compression
off at compressratio 1.00x (safetensors incompressible — no win at
recv). comfy-dev's ~112 GB batch is landing into it now.
- The R750xa shipped 2x 1.92 TB SATA SSD; mirrored that is ~1.74 TiB,
smaller than the pool it receives from. Migration would arrive at
~90% full with no growth room.
- Buy list: +2x 2 TB SATA SSD (6 bays free, HBA355i has the ports) ->
two mirror vdevs striped, ~3.49 TiB at ~45%, redundancy intact.
- Retain vs reclaim irv-ml1's /storetank after cutover: RETAIN
recommended, surfaced to the operator.
Also corrects branch (b)'s recorded rationale. comfy-dev enumerated all
twelve running containers: only comfyui mounts /storetank, so (b) was
unavailable during the transition, not structurally. Right conclusion,
wrong reason — infra-ops reasoned about the box when the question was
about the mount.
Memory-only; no version bump per the SemVer SKIP list.
Run 3c's new intended home is the GX10 rather than a power triage on ana-ml2: a ~240 W
appliance instead of the kilowatt-class box that tripped the breaker, and 121 GB unified
holds the 49 GB bf16 base comfortably where ana-ml2 was tight. The box is bare, so the
first move is a throughput probe rather than a harness port.
Also banked: the Ada migration settling on zfs send with branch (b) ruled out by irv-ml1
keeping its eight services; the Synapse 39-release upgrade with its one-way schema
migration, the appservice namespace opening and the admin API lockdown; the ratified room
alias convention; and a named failure class — a correct check aimed at the wrong object —
with six instances from one day across three sessions.
vh