A newbie - FreeNAS and Macs

[clearconnections]

Hi

We've just done our first install of FreeNAS and are using a new H-P ML10 with 6TB RAID5 zls (3*2TB) and 8GB RAM. The bulk of the use is for 4 new Macs using InDesign and the usual Adobe Creative Suite products. I'm seeing the CPU running at 60% for system (the red area of the graph) then near 100% when the blue user area is added.

I've attached the performance report graph

I guess this means the server is underpowered - would you expect that server to cope with 4 users?

Any feedback welcomed. At least I've discovered a great product in FreeNAS!

thanks
Gordon

 

[toadman]

Well, as with a lot of things, "it depends." Need more info on your hardware (which is why the forum rules state to list your hardware). What cpu do you have in the server? (There are several options according to HP.) What speed is your network?

What is the box doing at the time you took the pic? For example, is it scrubbing the pool? Or is it just serving files? If serving files what type of network shares are you using? SMB?

But short answer, I would think the server would be able to handle 4 clients. Unless maybe it's a dual-core and you are hammering it with 4 Gb or higher streams at once with some other work going on in the server itself.

 

[clearconnections]

Thanks for the reply

the server has a G440GHz 3.30 CPU and 8GB RAM and the disks are 3TB WD RED NAS drives. I've just checked and it's a dual core CPU which may explain the graph?

I have a dataset for all the Mac data accessed using AFP. There's another dataset using both AFP and SMB, the designers put files into this for the print production bods to create print jobs. By far the bulk of the work for the NAS is the designers. I'm not too sure what the box is doing as I'm new to FreeNAS an haven't got past the "fighting fires" stage with the client! The system was fine until we upgraded the Macs. The originals were pretty old but performed OK, these have i5 CPUs and 8GB RAM. They're connected to a gigabit managed switch in their location, itself connected to a gigabit port on their main network. The server is directly in to this. They use some pretty large sized (300MB+) documents occasionally

I have the option of putting in a (used) DL360G6 server with 2 quad core CPUs and 24GB RAM. If I use a USB stick for FreeNAS, would I be able to put the drives into this and have it recognise the zfs array?

Thanks and regards
Gordon

 

[toadman]

If you move the drives to a new system, yes, FreeNAS will be able to read them (assuming they are not behind a raid controller or something). With the possible exception of reconfiguring the network, should be painless.

See https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/migrating-hardware.47105/

Re: the dual-core in the current system, it *might* be under powered. You'd have to look at the network traffic graphs when you are seeing high CPU usage to see if it correlates. And understand what the system is doing. For example, I did slow down my scrub (2x/month) speed so it would not impact performance as much. I'm running in a VM with 2 vcpus and 8GB. But I'm only lightly loading the system.

 

[toadman]

Also, what kind of nics are you using? I ask because under high bandwidth a realtek could add noticeable cpu overhead. (Under normal or light load you probably wouldn't notice.)

 

[clearconnections]

The server has an NC211i H-P single port card. I'm about to try a DL360G6 with Broadcom cards, would it be worth teaming them?

 

[toadman]

While I can't find the HP part on the web, I assume it's running an Intel 211 gb controler, which should be fine. It's still odd to me that the dual core can't keep up with a single link. Hard to say without seeing further data on the workload.

You could team network cards, but if you are not keeping up with storage over 1 gb link adding more is just going to exacerbate the problem right? I would solve your CPU issue first with the one link, then work on increasing network performance if desired.

I mean, based on your graph you are just over 50% utilized on average for that hour. Is that a problem? Meaning are you seeing actual performance issues at the client?

 

[clearconnections]

The clients are seeing severely degraded performance to the extent they're doing all their work on the Mac desktops and copying the data to the server. there's an SMB share there also but it doesn't get used much. I've had the mac data volume share type set to Unix to allow AFP and SMB for copying the data to the new server through a PC, could this affect it?

 

[toadman]

Seems like a disciplined approach to debug is going to be needed. Given the performance issue, is it network config and/or hardware? Is it storage config (for the workload)? Is it cpu/memory related hardware? Etc... Assuming all low level items check out (e.g. iperf tests on the network) it may simply be case of an under powered server for the workload.

Re: sharing a single dataset with multiple protocols simultaneously... https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-use-afp-and-cifs-on-the-same-share.23251/

 

[clearconnections]

I'm moving the server to the same switch as the Macs today, it's a decent quality 1GB unmanaged unit. I looked at the server yesterday when there was no one in the building and no user activity on the server and saw the attached.

There are no scrubs running, it's set to do them midnight Sunday

 

[Glorious1]

I'm not going to be any use diagnosing your problem, but one thing is a red flag. You indicated that some dataset(s) are shared via both AFP and SMB. That is considered a no-no. From the user guide, Sharing chapter:

It is generally a mistake to share a volume or dataset with more than one share type or access method. Different types of shares and services use different file locking methods. For example, if the same volume is configured to use both NFS and FTP, NFS will lock a file for editing by an NFS user, but a FTP user can simultaneously edit or delete that file. This results in lost edits and confused users. Another example: if a volume is configured for both AFP and SMB, Windows users can be confused by the “extra” filenames used by Mac files and delete them. This corrupts the files on the AFP share. Pick the one type of share or service that makes the most sense for the types of clients accessing that volume, and use that single type of share or service. To support multiple types of shares, divide the volume into datasets and use one dataset per share.

Also from that section:

SMB: Server Message Block shares, also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS) shares, are accessible by Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD computers. Access is slower than an NFS share due to the single-threaded design of Samba. SMB provides more configuration options than NFS and is a good choice on a network for Windows systems. However, it is a poor choice if the CPU on the FreeNAS® system is limited; if the CPU is maxed out, upgrade the CPU or consider another type of share.

 

[clearconnections]

Thanks for that. The problem we have is there's a share which needs to be accessed by both the design studio and the production PCs and the SMB share is unusable for the Macs. the CPU / network surges we saw abated when we moved the server to the same switch as the Macs (in a remote office) so we're looking at the network now - hopefully we'll find an underlying issue

 

[Johnny Fartpants]

I'm moving the server to the same switch as the Macs today, it's a decent quality 1GB unmanaged unit. I looked at the server yesterday when there was no one in the building and no user activity on the server and saw the attached.

There are no scrubs running, it's set to do them midnight Sunday

I'd run top -P from the CLI and see whats running in the background.

 

[Johnny Fartpants]

Hi

We've just done our first install of FreeNAS and are using a new H-P ML10 with 6TB RAID5 zls (3*2TB) and 8GB RAM. The bulk of the use is for 4 new Macs using InDesign and the usual Adobe Creative Suite products. I'm seeing the CPU running at 60% for system (the red area of the graph) then near 100% when the blue user area is added.

I've attached the performance report graph

I guess this means the server is underpowered - would you expect that server to cope with 4 users?

Any feedback welcomed. At least I've discovered a great product in FreeNAS!

thanks
Gordon

What compression have you got on the datasets? You're not doing De-dupe are you?

 

[gegtor]

Open shell and type htop

Make a screenshot and show us what service is consuming that cpu time

 

[nojohnny101]

The problem we have is there's a share which needs to be accessed by both the design studio and the production PCs and the SMB share is unusable for the Macs.

This is not true, unless I am misunderstanding you. You can use SMB with both Macs and windows, in fact that is the protocol that is recommended if you have a mixed environment.