Disk Optimizations - aaronwmorris/indi-allsky GitHub Wiki

General

Reducing disk I/O on SD and MMC class storage devices can significantly extend their lifetime.

You can monitor per-process disk IO with sudo iotop -oPa

journald

systemd journald logging contributes to a significant amount of disk I/O. Changing the storage to volatile only logs to memory. This can result in an 80% reduction of IOs on a standard all sky system.

Screenshot_20230219_205900

sudo mkdir /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d

sudo tee /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/90-indi-allsky.conf <<EOF
[Journal]
Storage=volatile
Compress=yes
RateLimitIntervalSec=30s
RateLimitBurst=10000
SystemMaxUse=20M
EOF

sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

ext4 commit interval

Add commit=300 to the mount options for the filesystems.

  • File: /etc/fstab

      UUID=abcdabcd-1234-4c97-1234-181c2d402646   /   ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=300 0   1

Decrease swappiness

This will decrease the rate at which the Linux kernel will swap out memory pages to the swap file and reduce disk I/O.

echo "vm.swappiness = 1" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/90-indi-allsky.conf

sudo sysctl --system

tmpfs

Utilize a memory backed filesystem for /tmp to reduce writes

# /etc/fstab
...
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,nosuid,size=512m 0 0
...

Relocating the Image Directory to External Storage

To eliminate image capture writes to the SD card, you can move the image directory to an attached SSD, hard drive, or USB flash drive:

  1. Stop services:

    sudo systemctl stop indi-allsky.service gunicorn-indi-allsky.service

  2. Create target directory & copy existing images:

    sudo mkdir -p /mnt/storage/allsky/images
sudo rsync -av /var/www/html/allsky/images/ /mnt/storage/allsky/images/

  3. Update Flask configuration (/etc/indi-allsky/flask.json): Set INDI_ALLSKY_IMAGE_FOLDER to your new path:

    "INDI_ALLSKY_IMAGE_FOLDER": "/mnt/storage/allsky/images",

  4. Update Camera configuration: In the Web UI under Configuration → Camera Settings, set IMAGE_FOLDER to /mnt/storage/allsky/images (or via CLI with indi-allsky-ctl config).

  5. Repair and apply directory permissions with indi-allsky-ctl:

    sudo indi-allsky-ctl fix-perms

    fix-perms inspects /etc/indi-allsky/flask.json and the database, automatically creating darks/ and export/ subdirectories and applying chown -R indi-allsky:www-data and chmod 775 permissions.

  6. Restart services:

    sudo systemctl start indi-allsky.service gunicorn-indi-allsky.service