CPU count and Autotune

[Chris Dawalt]

I swapped my FreeNAS between two older AMD motherboards - one with a dual core processor, and one with a 6 core processor. I didn't notice any performance difference with regard to moving large files back and forth, so is it safe to say that more cores are not necessarily better?

I also tried a third swap to a brand new ASUS Crosshair V Formula (just to see if it would work) and FreeNAS would fire up, but would not recognize my four HDDs. I could see them in the GUI / web interface, but it looked like I had to import them or something to that effect to make them active again. I didn't want to mess anything up, so I stopped fooling with it and went back to the other two boards that seem to work regardless of what I do with them.

And when you switch motherboards and processors, how do you "restart" autotune to adjust to the "new" board?

 

[nightshade00013]

To have the autotune update for the new system disable it, remove all the tunes and reboot. Then enable autotune again and reboot.

If you're Using CIFS it only uses a single thread so multicore systems won't help speed up file transfers.

It is very possible you will have to import the drives on a change over. I moved two drives from a test system to my build in progress and had to import the drives to save the data on them. If you are not worried about the data you can just build a new pool. But it should be as simple as going to storage and clicking on import volume.

Remember as well that AMD hardware and enthusiast boards will bring a lot of problems as well since they are not well supported.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

To have the autotune update for the new system disable it, remove all the tunes and reboot. Then enable autotune again and reboot.

If you're Using CIFS it only uses a single thread so multicore systems won't help speed up file transfers.

It is very possible you will have to import the drives on a change over. I moved two drives from a test system to my build in progress and had to import the drives to save the data on them. If you are not worried about the data you can just build a new pool. But it should be as simple as going to storage and clicking on import volume.

Remember as well that AMD hardware and enthusiast boards will bring a lot of problems as well since they are not well supported.

Wow - I think you answered everything. I will experiment with your suggestions tomorrow. Thanks for the input, and so far I have had no issues with my AMD stuff. And I do keep a secondary backup of all my FreeNAS data on separate (non FreeNAS) drives - just in case, as you say - the AMD stuff decides not to play well with FreeNAS... Oh, and yes I am using CIFS. So I might as well swap back to the dual core and save some energy.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Wow - I think you answered everything. I will experiment with your suggestions tomorrow. Thanks for the input, and so far I have had no issues with my AMD stuff. And I do keep a secondary backup of all my FreeNAS data on separate (non FreeNAS) drives - just in case, as you say - the AMD stuff decides not to play well with FreeNAS... Oh, and yes I am using CIFS. So I might as well swap back to the dual core and save some energy.

Doubt you will save any energy so don't make your decision on that assumption.

 

[cyberjock]

Doubt you will save any energy so don't make your decision on that assumption.

+1. No telling what idle power actually is, and since nobody here that does hardcore testing uses AMD, we have no real-world metrics to recommend one over the other. I will tell you that my 4c/8t CPU basically uses the same idle power as my 8c/16t CPU.

 

[anodos]

If you're Using CIFS it only uses a single thread so multicore systems won't help speed up file transfers.

Except just about any cpu out there should be able to saturate a gigabit connection with CIFS. I think I came awfully close to saturating it once with a WD mycloud (armv6). So, typically, these are not the bottlenecks you're looking for.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

I think there is something I need to tweak in the BIOS, because the 6 core CPU in the other motherboard is running rather warm. The same processor in the original board was always cool, and like you say - seemed to idle most of the time. The VRMs and chipsets are also all very warm compared to the 2 core system. So I will see what is going on in the BIOS. Of course my first two older motherboards have very crude BIOS compared to the new ASUS Crosshair board. I changed from 12GB of RAM to 16GB and again, I didn't notice much difference with that either.

I am using my FreeNAS in a Windows network environment, so it is true that I am locked into using CIFS, right?

 

[anodos]

I think there is something I need to tweak in the BIOS, because the 6 core CPU in the other motherboard is running rather warm. The same processor in the original board was always cool, and like you say - seemed to idle most of the time. The VRMs and chipsets are also all very warm compared to the 2 core system. So I will see what is going on in the BIOS. Of course my first two older motherboards have very crude BIOS compared to the new ASUS Crosshair board. I changed from 12GB of RAM to 16GB and again, I didn't notice much difference with that either.

I am using my FreeNAS in a Windows network environment, so it is true that I am locked into using CIFS, right?

CIFS in one form or another (samba or a windows server) is pretty much the go-to solution in a windows networks. I'm pretty satisfied with samba performance and stability.

 

[Chris Dawalt]

Well, I spent some time with the Crosshair V motherboard and finally got it going. I kept getting the "no configured interface found" error and I checked in the documentation about how to resolve that problem. Much to my surprise I was able to manually configure the network interface and it came up after the first reboot. Then I reworked the autotune per nightshade00013.

So the new system, as unkosher as it may be, is up and running. Thanks for everyone's input!