CPU upgrade over RAM upgrade?

[Lastb0isct]

I have a quite underpowered CPU, since i knew i had room to grow and wanted to get started cheap it has suited me quite well for my workload. Until now...

I am noticing that i'm maxing out internal read/writes to separate Volumes at around 250MB/s and my System Load is high and ARC hits are somewhat low (~80% currently after rebuilding and pushing all my content back to the machine).

I currently have a Pentium G3220 with 16gb of DDR3 1600 RAM. My plan is to, within the next few month, upgrade either RAM or my CPU. I have looked into it and it seems that upgrading to a Xeon E3-1220 v3 won't be all that much and should double, if not triple my performance.

What would you recommend?

EDIT:

Forgot to post specs:

Supermico X10SL7-F
Pentium G3220 @ 3Ghz
16GB ECC DDR3 1600
5x4TB HGST NAS (Volume1)
5x3TB Seagate (Volume0)

 

[tvsjr]

What are your system loads? Are you doing anything else with the system (jails, etc.)? You need to adopt a very methodical approach to walk through the system, step-by-step, until you identify the bottleneck... then resolve it and move on.

 

[Lastb0isct]

What are your system loads? Are you doing anything else with the system (jails, etc.)? You need to adopt a very methodical approach to walk through the system, step-by-step, until you identify the bottleneck... then resolve it and move on.

My system loads and CPU Usage when doing the copy i mentioned above were:

This was with basically nothing else being done (plex server may have been scanning directories). My CPU is a 2 core CPU as well. I have no jails and am sharing out via NFS to around 5 or 6 clients with maybe 1 or 2 concurrent users at a time, just copying/reading off of the storage no Virtualization or heavy tasks.

What reads/writes should i be seeing on a well performing system? I believe 250MB/s is pretty slow for internal transfers on my setup. For a little more info my RAID config is

5x4TB @ RAIDZ1 (Media Share so this redundancy is okay)
5x3TB @ RAIDZ2

I was copying from the RAIDZ1 --> RAIDZ2.

 

[flyinfitz1]

You are running plex but have no jails? Seems odd to me. How are you moving the data? CIFS? If so I believe that a single threaded process which may cause your CPU usage to spike.

Also, Im not sure 250MB/s is really that slow on a traditional LAN. I would be pretty happy with that personally.

Just my novice 2 cents.

 

[Lastb0isct]

You are running plex but have no jails? Seems odd to me. How are you moving the data? CIFS? If so I believe that a single threaded process which may cause your CPU usage to spike.

Also, Im not sure 250MB/s is really that slow on a traditional LAN. I would be pretty happy with that personally.

Just my novice 2 cents.

I am running plex on a completely different machine. I am running no jails or other stuff on my freenas machine as it has an underpowered CPU i believe. Plex and most of my clients all connect to my freenas box via NFS.

250MB/s is local copies. That is 2000mbps for a local copy on the freenas machine via rsync from one volume to the other. I am thinking that i should be seeing around 400MB/s for decent speeds with my setup, but its possible that the RAID setups i have can't sustain that speed.

So i'm curious if its:
a) CPU
b) Memory
c) RAID Setup

that could be lowering my local copy speeds.

 

[Asimov1973]

your CPU usage is unusually high....I manage to download tens of torrents and stream HD movies in LAN AND via FTP to different KODI appliances from a SAMBA partition and I never (in 2 years) used more than 60% of my G2130 processor....Try using JUMBO FRAMES in both WINDOWS computers and in your NAS..

In Freenas go to Network --> Global Configuration -->Interfaces --> click on your LAN interface ---> Edit --> and write mtu 9000 in the OPTION field.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, no, don't do jumbo frames unless you're going to do that on your entire network and test to make sure it all works correctly. Bad idea.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/jumbo-frames-notes.26064/