Extremly slow write performance

[Patrik]

Hi,

I have searched through the forums but havent found anything that can help me sort my problem out, wich is as follows...

When i write to the disks via any variant of filecopy (smb) the speed is between 150 - 700 Kb/s!!!
I can however use ftp and via 5 parallell connections get a whooping 200 - 300 Kb/s each and so reach ca 1,5 Mb/s.

From the same setup i can, without problem, via smb stream full 1080p DTS video!!
Thats at least a read speed at around 35-40 Mb/s.

Why the big difference?
And why do i have such extreme low performance when writing to the disks?

The disks are formatted for zfs (no raid) and shared via cifs and attached at the SATA-3 ports with ahci mode enabled.
The things i have found in other questions regarding slow writespeeds; Large RW Support, Send Files with sendfile(2) and AIO, is all enabled.

Edit 2: In the disk settings I have transfermode - auto. Could this be a problem with sata3?
In the dropdown you only have SATA 1.5Gbit/s and SATA 3Gbit/s. There is no SATA 6Gbit/s.... Should I manually select SATA 3Gbit/s?
Is there any risk of loosing data on the disk if I change this setting??

The FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA4 system is installed on a 4 GB CFcard on the VIA VT6415 controller.

Edit 1: I have upgraded to RC1 and now i get around 1,5Mb/s on averege. The issue prevails....

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have the following hardware configuration:

Motherboard: ASUS P8H67 REV 3.0 H67 S-1155
Processor: INTEL CORE I3 2120 3.30GHZ 3MB S-1155
Memory: 2 x Kingstone DIMM DDR3 4GB 1333MHZ CL9

Storage Controllers:
Intel® H67(B3) chipset:
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s)
4 x SATA 3Gb/s port(s)
Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10
VIA VT6415 controller:
1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 for up to 2 PATA devices

HDD: 2 x WD CAVIAR GREEN 2TB SATA/600 64MB

Network: Gb all the way.

/Patrik

 

[SoftDux-Rudi]

Did you align / format the drives with 4K sector support? This is also known as Advanced Format.
Some drives will perform super slow then they're not formatted with 4K sectors.

 

[uutzinger]

I had similar problems with about 900KB/s read and write performance on a fresh install.
First I updated bios, flashed disk controller firmware which did not improve performance.
Then I checked with dd what the internal disk performance was using the instructions in the post "Sticky: Notes on Performance, Benchamarks and Cache." I found that my disk performance is well beyond the theoretical network performance.
Then I swapped the network card and got no improvement.
Finally I bypassed the office type network switch and connected directly to building network with building supplied network cables. These go to commercial grade networking equipment.
I got >100MB/s download and something in the range of 50MB/s upload using CIFS and large files.

I conclude that either the office network switch, cables to the switch or other hardware attached to the switch are faulty and perhaps the same is true for your case.

 

[jgreco]

That's a good guess. Be sure to look at your network configuration. I don't know if it shows it in the GUI (maybe a desirable feature). You can do it from the command line easily enough, just "ifconfig <foo>" or "ifconfig -a":

# ifconfig -a
em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=9b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM>
ether 00:50:56:ae:00:1f
inet 10.1.1.10 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.1.1.255
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active

Notice the media is autoselected but has selected 1000bT/full, which is reasonable. It's possible for gear to autoselect stupid things, like 10bT-UTP/half.