SOLVED Boot performance seems to be low

[Smojo]

Hi,

I build a little NAS system on my own but I would call myself a beginner (in installing and configuring such things).
At first here are the facts of the system:

• Board: ASRock J4205-ITX (4x 1.5 GHz, 2.6 GHz Turbo)
• Memory: 2x Kingston KVR16LS11/8 → 16GB
• OS-Disk: Samsung 850 Evo 250GB
• Data-Disks: 3x Western Digital Red8TB
• FreeNAS version: FreeNAS-11.0-U4 (54848d13b) → FreeNAS-11-STABLE
• ...tell me if you need more details

The installation generally went fine. So I can access the system via web-gui and I don't see any problems up to now. I plan to use it as simple backup system at first so I think it don't need to be turned on the whole time.

So the two possibilities are:
1. Turn it on when needed
2. configure something like standby / wake on lan to save some energy

Regarding 1. I was wondering that it takes nearly 10 minutes (at least more than 8) to boot/reboot.

So my first question is:
Is this normal?
If not:
Can anybody give me some tips what I can check to ensure if everything is ok and configured correctly?

Regarding 2. I read that it depends on a lot of things (LAN module on the board, driver supported by FreeNAS, etc.). So let's go on step by step.

I already searched for some other threads regarding this but I didn't found anything helpful (or I didn't understand it)

Thanks in advance.

 

[joeschmuck]

Q1: That is quite a small unit and light CPU. In the BIOS are you in Eco mode? This will slow things down considerably according to the review I read. 1.5GHz is not a very fast CPU but 8 minutes does seem to be a bit long. It would be good to have an accurate time for the boot process, what I mean is to have a monitor connected to the computer, power it on, start timing from when FreeNAS starts to boot (do not include the time from power on and watching the BIOS do it's thing and do it internal checks, we can't control that). Stop the timer once FreeNAS is up. Right now I suspect you are including the motherboard selftests like all the RAM testing can take time, you should be able to streamline that.

Q2: You may be able to do this however please understand that FreeNAS was not designed to be used in this manner, it was designed for power on 100% of the time. With your tiny motherboard and CPU I don't see why you couldn't just leave it powered on all the time, move your system dataset to the boot device and then place the hard drives into a low power mode. Realize that if you frequently power up the drives that it likely will shorten their life.

 

[Smojo]

Thanks for the fast reply.

So maybe we concentrate on Q1 for now.

Today I will leave it as it is for today and go on investigating this the next days (pending on when I find the time to do so).

There is a monitor attached, so I can watch the system booting.

I will measure the time and make some notes regarding the boot process and what takes a lot of time.

start timing from when FreeNAS starts to boot

As there are a lot of log entries while the system boots, is there anything which indicates the FreeNAS boot part is starting?

 

[joeschmuck]

As there are a lot of log entries while the system boots, is there anything which indicates the FreeNAS boot part is starting?

Yes, watch the monitor and it will tell you that FreeNAS is booting and starts a countdown timer of 5 seconds. I think you have not been looking at your monitor when you boot up the system.

Thanks for the fast reply.

We try to do that here because most of the time someone is waiting for an answer so they can try to fix a problem. If a person does not get a quick response then either the people who have read the question just don't know the answer or the question makes it appear the person who posted it is too lazy to look up the answer on their own. A simple Google search can find a lot of answers.

 

[Smojo]

Hi,

today I watched the boot procedure very careful.

So here the notes I took:

• I would say after the 10 seconds the BIOS (UEFI) stuff as well as the bootloader (you probably meen this regarding countdown timer of 5 seconds) is gone
• I see some messages which includes: "FreeBSD" as well as "freenas_sysctl" so I'm pretty sure that these messages already belong to the FreeNAS boot procedure

I will write down the exact minute:seconds and time below

• 00:40: "Trying to mount root from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default []..."
• 03:38: Done. Next message "Loading early kernel modules:"
• 04:00: 4 times the following block of messages which looks like an error.
  
• 04:20: after some other messages - same message block again
• 04:40: after some other messages - same message block again
• 04:50: "Beginning ZFS vol imports"
• 05:00: "Loading kernel modules" + "pmc: Unknown Intel CPU"
  
• 07:33: "nfsd: can't register svc name"
• 09:50: Boot finished as I see the console menu:
  

So the only thing which might be a little bit slow is the mount root from zfs:...
Any advise how to analyze this further or if possible optimize it?

Beside the shutdown takes about 1 minute (measured 01:08).

Thanks in advance.

 

[joeschmuck]

In the BIOS are you in Eco mode?

Did you look at this yet?

 

[Ericloewe]

Those steps all seem unusually slow to me

 

[Smojo]

Today I had the time to test with some Bios settings.

At first the good news. The systems boots in 2 minutes and 52 seconds after I pushed the power on button. :D

The message block which I mentioned last time is gone as well.

Under CPU Bios setting I also found something which is called 'Power Gear'. It has the possible settings:

• Eco
• Normal
  
• Sport.

It was set to 'Normal' but it doesn't matter when I set it e.g. to 'Sport'.

I changed a lot of other stuff and I'm currently try to find out which one really makes the difference.
"Trying to mount root from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/default []..." is done in some seconds now.
Below the message: "vmx_init: VMX operation disabled by BIOS"

I assume the setting which has todo with this vmx stuff speeds up the whole thing.

I will update the thread as soon as I know it exactly.

 

[Smojo]

The retarding setting is called 'CPU C State Support'.
In UEFI it can be found under
Advanced --> CPU Configuration

Description of this setting:
"Enable CPU C State Support for power saving. It is recommanded to keep C1, C6, C7, C8, C9 and C10 all enabled for better power Saving."

It was set to C6 I did not test if another setting works better. Currently it is diabled completely and the system boots (as explained) much faster.

The message "vmx_init: VMX operation disabled by BIOS" has nothing todo with it. It is related to enabling and disabling 'Intel Virtualization Technology' (also under CPU Configuration as well)