SOLVED EE3C226D2i and i3-4370 bad network performance

[d4nY]

Hey guys,

I have a little network problem, but first my current system:

• i3-4370 2x3.80 GHz
• ASRock E3C226D2i (BIOS v3.3)
• 16 GB ECC RAM (Kingston KVR16LE11/8i)
• 6 x WD Red 3TB
• Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter
• FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201506292332

So after my old system (ASRock FM2A85X-itx and a A8-5500) had some problems and it annoyed me that the old system had no ECC RAM I ordered the above configuration (since it needed to mini-ITX and some people had good experience with it)

So far so good, the system is running pretty well except for the network performance. I'm using CIFS to access my files and noticed the following things:

• With both onboard-NICs (i210) I get about 60 MB/s writing to the NAS (pretty steady) and about 40-50 MB/s reading from NAS (more unsteady)
• With the Intel NIC I get about 70 MB/s writing to the NAS (again very stable) and about 90-100 MB/s reading from NAS (not this stable, but absolutely acceptable)

I'm running a RAID-Z2 with encryption enabled (but testing with no encryption had no impact) testing against my PC (Intel 82579V Onboard NIC, which writes perfectly stable 100 MB/s to my Windows Server)

So my questions are: Do i really need a NIC for 1 Gbit networking? I honestly can't believe that the i210 isn't able to saturate a gig. And how can i resolve this?

I'm sorry if I forgot something, I'm pretty uncommon with FreeBSD (and its shell) so if you need any information, just tell me what you need and I will give it to you :)

Thanks in advance

BR
d4nY

E: I just did some testing with iperf/jperf. With the onboard NICs I get about 890 MBit/s reading from NAS and about 330 MBit/s writing to NAS with a single stream and about 900 MBit/s with multiple streams.
Any opionions about that?
I will do some testing with dd on the disks too

E2: Here are the results with dd (ada0 delivered similiar results):

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada1 bs=1024M count=20
20+0 records in
20+0 records out
21474836480 bytes transferred in 148.251109 secs (144854475 bytes/sec)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada2 bs=1024M count=20
20+0 records in
20+0 records out
21474836480 bytes transferred in 143.828123 secs (149309023 bytes/sec)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada3 bs=1024M count=20
20+0 records in
20+0 records out
21474836480 bytes transferred in 134.585086 secs (159563270 bytes/sec)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada4 bs=1024M count=20
20+0 records in
20+0 records out
21474836480 bytes transferred in 144.979600 secs (148123160 bytes/sec)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada5 bs=1024M count=20
20+0 records in
20+0 records out
21474836480 bytes transferred in 149.292695 secs (143843853 bytes/sec)

 

[d4nY]

OK, so after some testing again I think I found the solution (maybe somebody can confirm and explain it to me)

So first I tried FTP (since FTP should be faster than CIFS) and - surprise - it hit the 99% writing to the NAS. Reading from NAS was not this fast (something between 40% and 90%) but acceptable (and maybe a degraded the pool could be the cause)

This led me to the conclusion, that the NIC and CPU is capable of transmitting with good speed so I was testing CIFS again, but this time I changed two things:

• I disabled "Local Master" since there are just Windows 7 machines in my LAN and a domain server is also present
• I changed " Server Minium Protocol" to SMB2. At first it was on NT1 because my smartphone used to backup to the NAS and the app couldn't handle SMB2

Now I get super steady 99% with CIFS (on my encrypted raid-z2 pool) writing to the NAS and about 50-80% reading from NAS (again maybe because of the degraded pool)

I guess the Minimum Protocol could be the cause, is that true?

 

[BigDave]

Default protocol for Samba (ver. 9.3)

I guess the Minimum Protocol could be the cause, is that true?

For CIFS, you shouldn't stray from default IIRC

 

[SweetAndLow]

Changing minimum protocol version shouldn't make a difference unless your client is broken. Your client machine will negotiate the highest supported protocol version.

 

[Ericloewe]

Changing minimum protocol version shouldn't make a difference unless your client is broken. Your client machine will negotiate the highest supported protocol version.

Some HP printers are, it seems. I think mine is one of them, but I have never even considered trying to use those weird features like scan to network. :p

 

[d4nY]

Default protocol for Samba (ver. 9.3)
View attachment 8432
For CIFS, you shouldn't stray from default IIRC

OK, thanks for this information. I will use the defaults then

Changing minimum protocol version shouldn't make a difference unless your client is broken. Your client machine will negotiate the highest supported protocol version.

Yeah that's what I thought, but somehow my machine mixed it up

Anyway my problem is solved so thank you guys :D