Why does the zfs-import-cache service take such a long time to load?

OpenZFS
1

As the title states. For some reason, three of the services linked to ZFS, zfs-import-cache.service, zfs-volume-wait.service and zfs-mount.service, are taking a lot time to load.

A little bit of preface, though: I have 2x 4TB SSDs, 5x 4TB HDDs, and 1x 128GB SSD (OS). The 5 HDDs were connected with a PCI expander card, while the SSDs were connected directly to the mobo. Yesterday, I replaced the PCI card with an LSI 9300-16i; I removed all the connectors from the mobo and connected everything to the new card. Since then, rebooting the system takes a long time due to the three aforementioned services - does anyone have any suggestion as to why that is and how I may potentially solve it? Could it be due to it being connected to the card instead of directly into the mobo? I suspect it’s the SSDs being connected to the former instead of the latter.

$ systemd-analyze blame
21.911s zfs-import-cache.service
18.536s zfs-mount.service
17.918s zfs-volume-wait.service
...

EDIT
Analyzing the various services I see the following:

journalctl -u zfs-import-cache.service

...
-- Boot e3cf575e60d846e99d3b0c18418dec5b --
Aug 14 12:47:34 homeserver systemd[1]: Starting zfs-import-cache.service - Import ZFS pools by cache file...
Aug 14 12:48:25 homeserver systemd[1]: Finished zfs-import-cache.service - Import ZFS pools by cache file.
-- Boot 28bbd75d09cb415b9ace3e99c1ae81ff --
Aug 15 18:08:44 homeserver systemd[1]: Starting zfs-import-cache.service - Import ZFS pools by cache file...
Aug 15 18:08:47 homeserver zpool[1241]: cannot import 'flash_temp': no such pool or dataset
Aug 15 18:08:48 homeserver zpool[1241]: cannot import 'tank': no such pool or dataset
Aug 15 18:09:12 homeserver zpool[1241]:         Destroy and re-create the pool from
Aug 15 18:09:12 homeserver zpool[1241]:         a backup source.
Aug 15 18:09:12 homeserver zpool[1241]:         Destroy and re-create the pool from
Aug 15 18:09:12 homeserver zpool[1241]:         a backup source.
Aug 15 18:09:12 homeserver zpool[1241]: cachefile import failed, retrying
Aug 15 18:09:12 homeserver systemd[1]: Finished zfs-import-cache.service - Import ZFS pools by cache file.
-- Boot fabfada2798143c1b7537659e14d5372 --
Aug 16 08:44:48 homeserver systemd[1]: Starting zfs-import-cache.service - Import ZFS pools by cache file...
Aug 16 08:45:10 homeserver systemd[1]: Finished zfs-import-cache.service - Import ZFS pools by cache file.

The other two do not contain anything noteworthy.

2

Curious why you’re getting these lines

Looks like it’s trying to import pools that don’t exist?

3

Those were my thoughts as well. Those are actually the only two pools I have. The curious part, though, is that, as you can see, on Aug 16, the error message is no more and the pools seem to work just fine :thinking: