Dramatically different SMB performance between machines

[chb]

Hi all I'm a bit perplexed because one of my windows machines is hitting 100MB/s transferring to the NAS over cat5 but another machine on the same network is only able to hit about 500K/s over wifi, it's very much not the network generally, or the drives in the slow machine. I was getting 100MB/s rates from this same machine that is now slow, and this isn't occurring because the drives are busy.

cheers

 

[jgreco]

That's not that unusual for wifi, especially with low quality gear. Latency plays a huge role in performance, and wifi often doesn't have good latency. Or bandwidth. Or channel interference. Or other things operating on those unreserved 2.4/5GHz frequencies.

 

[chb]

That's not that unusual for wifi, especially with low quality gear. Latency plays a huge role in performance, and wifi often doesn't have good latency. Or bandwidth. Or channel interference. Or other things operating on those unreserved 2.4/5GHz frequencies.

I understand this, however for every other means of traffic to the slow machine (http, torrent, transferring to other windows machines) the speed is as expected (100MB/s). It's only traffic to and from the freenas smb share from the slow machine.

 

[jgreco]

I'm not an SMB guy, so I am approaching this from a general networking angle.

I have been told that SMB is highly transactional and relatively inefficient, and when combined with the effectively half-duplex nature of wifi, this all works out poorly. Googling "smb slow wifi" yields many threads that suggest this is a common problem; I can tell you I have semi-regularly heard about it for many years, but I don't know what to tell you to do about it.

 

[chb]

I'm not an SMB guy, so I am approaching this from a general networking angle.

I have been told that SMB is highly transactional and relatively inefficient, and when combined with the effectively half-duplex nature of wifi, this all works out poorly. Googling "smb slow wifi" yields many threads that suggest this is a common problem; I can tell you I have semi-regularly heard about it for many years, but I don't know what to tell you to do about it.

I have to bow to your wisdom, the wifi seemed to be the cause of the issue, i moved the router and receiver and switched to 5G. My issue now is that //truenas appears and can be accessed from one machine but while it appears in windows network devices and asks for login details (which are correct and working on another machine) it says it cannot access as if it doesn't exist. I think I might have changed a DHCP setting somewhere it was a toggle but not the DHCP toggle on the eth0 of host, which is enabled as default.

 

[chb]

Also I can access the control panel at 192.168.1.104

 

[jbarranco]

Also god forbid you're trying to access an SMB share on a Mac... even slower

 

[chb]

Also god forbid you're trying to access an SMB share on a Mac... even slower

I can only assume, having successfully tried to hackintosh what is now the server and the Mac UEFI partition has remained through countless partitions and reformats. I can't imagine what it took to make that work for a noob like me haha..

 

[chb]

For anyone stumbling on this thread, you may find that setting the guest account to something other than nobody (ie create an account with smb share privileges) will alleviate some access issues.