Avid ProTools projects are opening much slower on SMB than AFP

[Studio_User]

We use Truenas Core TrueNAS-13.0-U4 for our ProTools sessions and however AFP is deprecated is still much faster when opening sessions than SMB.
The issue is, when opening session, Avid Pro Tools is locating quite a big number of small audio files which are usually located in one folder. This will maxed out smbd thread up to 100%. Smbd log is not flooded with error messages and not even disk activity is abnormal. The same operation takes 1min on AFP but 10mins on SMB.
However copying large files is outstanding 900MB/s SMB and 600MB/s AFP on our 10Gbit network
Somebody has any idea what might be wrong?
Thanks!

Clients: MacStudio M1/10GBit ethernet/Monterey OS
Avid Pro Tools 2023.3

TrueNAS-13.0-U4
Dell PowerEdge R730xd 16-Core 3.20 GHz
386GB RAM
HBA330 12Gb SAS
Seagate SAS disks in pool
10Gb/s ethernet

SMB and AFP config is truenas default.... no aux params.

 

[winnielinnie]

I'd play around with allowing the metadata (in ARC) more grace.

ZFS "ARC" doesn't seem that smart...

Without yet resorting to adding an L2ARC, is there a "tuneable" that I can test which instructs the ARC to prioritize metadata? I upgraded from 16GB to 32GB ECC RAM. Yet there is zero change in this behavior. This keeps happening: I run regular rsync tasks from a few local clients, which is...

www.truenas.com

(I happily use a value of 6442450944 now.)

However, in the meantime, you might want to revert back to 13.0-U3.1.

 

[milkaudio]

Same problem here but on scale,

TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.3.3
Dell x730xd. Pool is on nvme drives.
128gb ram

Opening large protools sessions takes a long time on locating audio files.

I have also noticed that when selecting many small audio files (1000+) and copying, takes an immense amount of time. But if you copy the root folder, copying is normal.

Is this something that can be fixed?

 

[John45622]

Not sure if this is related as I'm also running ProTools machines. When using ChronoSync to sync large library folders (containing 10k+ objects) the SMB volume will just hard-dismount from the client running Chronosync. This has been happening since the FreeNas days and I never was able to resolve it. Even narrowing down where the problem is (TN, OS X or Chronosync) is impossible. Neither OSX nor Cs show any messages inn logs when this happens. It seems like SMB somehow "overloads" and crashes when CS is comparing 10k+ objects if they need syncing. Also no idea where to look in TN.
This happens with both 1Gbit and 10Gbit connections. The latter even with no switch involved. Just a direct connect from the Mac to TN.
Other things I have never been able to resolve:
Deleting hundreds of items form a folder often is extremely slow (1 file per second). Sometime I have to let this run over night!
Sometimes I get an "item can*t be deleted because it's busy" message and I have some files that have been on the server alone in a folder for years because they won't delete. Neither via the terminal nor MacOS. (for the latter two ossues I have opened theads here since the FreeNAS days but the problems never resolved over YEARS of TN updates and OS X updates.