SOLVED Browsing directories slow

[slf]

Hello,

I do not seem to have a transfer problem as I am getting over 100MBps transfer speeds with the cat5 plugged in direct. A bit slower on wireless but still good. I can play video without any pausing or problems.

The problem I am having is browsing directories. It does not matter if it is one file or one hundred files in a direcotry it pauses for a good 20 seconds before it lets me into the directory to view it. It is driving me crazy.

My system:

Xeon E5345 2.3Ghz Quad Core 16GB RAM 4 750Gig drives set as ZFS2

Can anyone suggest what can be done to stop this long pause?

Thank you,

SLF

 

[William Grzybowski]

Browsing how? Samba/CIFS? Local (ssh)?

 

[slf]

Cifs

Hi,

Sorry. I set it up as CIFS with Anonymous access to the share.

UPDATE: I rebooted the server and it seems to be working better now. It is still not as fast as other real Windows shares (only displaying the directories) but at least it is coming up faster now.

Is there a way to set FreeNAS to cache the directories so they come up faster?

Thank you,

SLF

 

[jamesshaw84]

I am also having a problem with extremely slow browsing and directory listing on my CIFS / Samba share. Sometimes its quite responsive, sometimes it takes 20 seconds to show subfolders after clicking into one. As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with how much RAM is being used, what the CPU load is, etc. on the FreeNAS.

This is being used for a photography company so customer service can pull up any of the millions of photos we've taken while on the phone with customers, so it needs to be snappy! Right now it is the sucks. Any ideas?

Here are my specs:
Intel i5-760
12GB RAM
8x 2TB Drives in a eSATA RAID box
All 8 drives in a RAID-Z2 for 11-ish TB Storage.

 

[ProtoSD]

This post has been redacted.

 

[r2lee2]

First post and sorry if i step on anyone's toes or make the wrong move here, I been reading these forums for a while and have been able to setup a FreNAS box with 3 2TB drives. I am experiencing slow transfer rates with CIFS and would like to try your suggestions but I have no idea on the GUI I would go to change these settings I look all over and cannot find the aux settings.

Also could you point me to a location where i can find out how to change the loader.config? I know nothing about linux so I am probably over my head here.

Thanks and sorry is this is not the way to ask for help.

 

[ProtoSD]

This post has been redacted.

 

[ProtoSD]

To see the AUX settings, you might need to click on the System icon at the top of the GUI, then click Settings and Advanced. There you will see a checkbox that says "Show advanced settings by default", check that box and click Save at the bottom.

 

[r2lee2]

protosd,

Great stuff, thanks for the reply and the clear instructions. I have made all the changes above and i am now screaming at 95+Mb/sec up from 23-38MB/sec. I don't know what did it because i set everything you listed up at once. Thank you much for your help. I did however run into an odd issue that was not happening before.

When i rebooted after the initial setup I could not get on the network, the IP address was right but no network connectivity. Took 3 reboots and it finnaly came back online, idk maybe my card is dying?

Thanks again.

 

[ProtoSD]

When i rebooted after the initial setup I could not get on the network, the IP address was right but no network connectivity. Took 3 reboots and it finnaly came back online, idk maybe my card is dying?

That's really strange, I don't think any of that stuff should cause that, but I could be wrong. If it happens again you could try disabling 1 setting at a time and see which one it might be.

I'm glad to hear you're getting great results now!

 

[tigerdom96]

Hello

I am experiencing the exact same problems....

I tried to follow your guide in how to fix this, however I could make any of the changes you suggested. I cannot access the Auxiliary Settings. As you mentioned, I tried to enable the Advanced Settings in the settings/system, however there was no such check box and label. Any suggestions, how to change the settings??

The loader.conf in the boot directory has got no code similar to yours at the moment. I tried accessing it using winscp in ftp


I am using the build: FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p2-x64


Best Regards

 

[ProtoSD]

This post has been redacted.

 

[tigerdom96]

Hi
Thanks for your reply.

I checked again, but strangely I do not have those settings. This can be seen in the screen-shots. One shows the lack of the options and the other the firmware number.



I tried the tuntables, and I do not feel any difference with the browsing speed. I have 4gb of ram therefore i halved all of your values. Is this correct?

Thx a lot!!

 

[ProtoSD]

This post has been redacted.

 

[tigerdom96]

OK, thats strange...

I tried different browsers and still no different result; Chrome, Firefox and IE... I will try and install a new machine virtually and see if the settings are different there.

For the tuntables, I made the changes again you suggested, but still no speed up :'(

Thx a lot for your help!!
Dom

 

[mo100]

Thanks protosd for posting this fix. I had started to suffer from abysmal browsing, easily over 5mins to open a folder (from Win7). Upgraded to "FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE_MULTIMEDIA-p2-x86" from BETA1, which did nothing to help. Also I started by adding your CIFS which did nothing noticeable. After I added all your loader.conf settings, (via GUI, then rebooted), everything was working great again. Instant opening of folders again. Thanks again.

MO

 

[ProtoSD]

Thanks for the feedback MO, glad it went well!

 

[BillyTheFish]

Protosd, you totally rock!

I installed the latest release fresh and it was working perfectly for a few weeks. Then it started hanging and got to the point where I could access the Web Gui but couldn't access any of my shares from Windows 7. Trying to troubleshoot it, I came across this thread and thought I would try it (directory access had got a bit slow before the system started freezing). It cured the problem! I can access my data again!!

This definitely should be a stick or a big part of the FAQ.

Any chance you could do a quick write-up of what each tuneable and Aux parameter actually does?

Thanks again fella!

 

[ProtoSD]

This definitely should be a stick or a big part of the FAQ.

Any chance you could do a quick write-up of what each tuneable and Aux parameter actually does?

Thanks again fella!

You're welcome, glad it helped!

There are so many threads on this topic it didn't occur to me to stick this thread, so it's stuck now!

I started to write another of my long detailed tutorials about tuning and variables, it's sitting in the drafts folder in my blog. I'm currently on vacation until *hopefully* October if things don't continue to go wrong....

My first priority is getting a Serviio plugin to work, but after that I'll try and work on finishing that tutorial *and* updating the FAQ. :)

Cheers!

-- Proto

 

[Deaks2]

I am running 8.2b4 with the following hardware:

Sandy Bridge 2.6 Ghz
8 GB RAM
3*1.5 TB ZFS RAID with 30 GB SSD cache. Disks have 4k clusters.
Gigabit

Running transfer tests I always max out my network connection. However, browsing my single CIFS share is quite slow, directory listings (especially my 19000+ file MP3 folder) are slow. I had the same issues with 8.04-Multimedia.

I run a minidlna and Firefly server, but otherwise this is a light duty home NAS. I have 2 iSCSI targets on file extents (was device extents with 8.04) for Windows 7 backup of my two machines.

I plugged in the mods listed in your posts, however, they do not seem to have any real effect on my system. I put all the tunables in and rebooted for them to take effect (autotune disabled). The CIFS aux settings are weird, I cannot put them in the CIFS service, otherwise Samba crashes. This also occurred with 8.04. I put then in the aux settings of my single CIFS share and Samba does not complain (but then again, they may not be having any effect there...)

I'd really appreciate ANY help :)

Here are some screens of my config: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/iol850egxcwcf9o/zJ8JFnhsRs