Quick tip if your BTRFS system seems to freeze from time to time
Intro#
In this article I will explain 2 configurations that you might consider if using BTRFS and start noticing some freezing on the system.
Beahvior#
From time to time I started noticing that the system was getting freeze (1-2s) on everything. Mouse, window manager, sound, graphics and was not getting any outputs that justify this behavior for my Arch Linux system.
After googling a bit and getting to some Reddit posts, I managed to find some people that have the same issue, and it seems this behavior was all connected to BTRFS.
This two options seemed to work for me, as I also have SSDs
Disable quotas in BTRFS#
It seems quotas are still buggy. As I don’t use them I run the following to disable them.
sudo btrfs quota disable /foo
NOTE: execute for all your mount points
Run fstrim#
fstrim is used on a mounted filesystem to discard (or “trim”) blocks which are not in use by the filesystem. This is useful for solid-state drives (SSDs) and thinly-provisioned storage.
Running the following command will trim all mounted filesystems mentioned in /etc/fstab on devices that support the discard operation.
sudo fstrim -Av
NOTE: Running fstrim frequently, or even using mount -o discard, might negatively affect the lifetime of poor-quality SSD devices. For most desktop and server systems a sufficient trimming frequency is once a week.
That’s it now reboot the computer and you should notice some differences.