I have a high-end machine with 16 gigs of ram. AutoZFS installed.
What is AutoZFS? Or did you mean to say that you used the installer to set up ZFS for you?
With issues like these it's very important to be as precise and to the point as possible so that there can be no confusion about anything. See; for all I know you could have installed some weird software which is now messing things up.
I limited ARC to 10gig because my desktop system was running out of memory and swap, and then freezing. It's STILL doing it.
ARC? Also: how did you limit it?
(edit) Went over your profile and checked out
another thread of yours. You meant to say that you set
vfs.zfs.arc_max. Why assume though that it was ZFS causing your issues? I would definitely recommend against messing with ZFS tunable settings, especially because I find it hard to believe that this caused by ZFS. It is memory hungry, sure, but it does
not gobble up all memory in the likes as you've been describing.
Also: you're not really giving us enough information to even start analyzing what could be going on. For example... How is your swap set up? How is your ZFS pool set up? Other than limiting
vfs.zfs.arc_max; what else did you change?
FreeBSD is definitely not optimized out-of-the-box for high spec desktops.
Yet it is.
And speaking of desktops: what software do you use for that? Because by default FreeBSD is not a desktop OS, that's all handled by 3rd party software starting with X. Which means that there is plenty of extra's going on where things could have been mis-configured or failing otherwise. And that's hardly something you can blame FreeBSD for.
(edit)
Also very important: what version of FreeBSD are you using anyway?
(last edit)
I looked this up and it seems that the installer provides you with 2Gb worth of swap by default, as far as I can tell this is a static value. So is it possible that you set up 2Gb worth of swap on that setup? Try using
gpart show
to find out.
That could definitely explain a thing or two....