i guess i have different issue than what started this thread but it feels similar and that git config helped somehow. wild guesses. looks like if try to deliberately consume memory from userland, i get swapping and wired, including arc, also goes below 1g eventually. but this would mean that 3g wired came out of nowhere. even more. from something. didn't vmstat -m show it? i never ran it then. maybe first we need to find what causes it. and then it's question what's the solution. i try to understand what that git config does. as git completed all it's tasks, it must have done something slower. but what needs time in zfs? compression? but cpu seemed pretty idle. disk io? if so, shouldn't it just wait? normally things wait. compression, network transfer, disk io, swapping. it could be questionable why 30g git repo should be used with 4g ram but i don't even know why it sometimes fails. why limiting git helps. couldn't system self-limit it, maybe by just waiting or so. i guess why git didn't swap was probably it never needed that much memory. it however asked kernel to do something and that needed a ton of memory. if it was configured to spread it out over longer timeframe, that didn't do anything. so maybe people smarter than me could figure it out. fix is here, but i have no idea what i fixed. all i know is that this chops up the tasks into smaller chunks in order to not choke it. i'm not that bad on it. but i can't wrap my head around fs internals that much either? read file, write file, rename file, delete file? i read git mmaps files, that would iirc put file into ram for fast access. but can you overdo it? funnily, limits help. i could do more research. i bet there are people here who could understand it better. that, should any operation like that go beyond ram, even if ram is only 4g. i'm much familiar with running out of "usual" memory. so yeah, if no changes, it's no need to rush to 14 either. so i'm dabbling in dark room still. fix is here. still curious on better fix tho. if there is any. surely there are still tiny vm's or embedded hw that could benefit from zfs too, and those don't really have 1t ram. yet they might do something, maybe not git, but something else, even if slower, that would trigger it again. unlikely that i can find or fix it. but i'm curious