High-Speed Windows Client Performance Tuning

[NickF]

NickF submitted a new resource:

High-Speed SMB Client Performance Tuning - One Man's Journey Into the Relatively Undocumented

There's a burgeoning trend I've noticed over the past few years in this community. That same trend exists for both home users and business use cases. That trend is the idea of tuning for single-client performance is becoming more important to folks in general. Video Production houses are number one on that list, with HomeLab nuts like myself coming in a close second.

Having multiple NVME drives in a storage pool you are connecting to over ethernet comes with many performance...

Read more about this resource...

 

[asap2go]

Is hardware offloading activated?
Did you also try with Linux?

 

[Volts]

iperf2 is multithreaded and has an official Windows client. It's generally recommended for high-bandwidth testing on Windows.

iperf2 comparison:

https://iperf2.sourceforge.io/IperfCompare.html

iperf3 comparison:

Throughput Tool Comparision

There are a number of open-source command line tools available for Unix that measure memory-to-memory network throughput.

fasterdata.es.net

iperf3 faq: "iperf3 parallel stream performance is much less than iperf2. Why?"

iperf3 FAQ — iperf3 3.15 documentation

software.es.net

Jumbo Frames to 9014 did seem to help, but in doing so I have statically increased the number of issues in the TCP stack.

What sort of issues?

 

[essinghigh]

I'd very much recommend giving this a read:
https://community.spiceworks.com/to...-season-003-w11-smb-performance-where-are-you
(it's a multi-parter that goes into detail on the entire TCP stack)

There was a lot I didn't know here, and it was an excellent learning resource.
(this part in particular)

Near the end he publishes a script that is designed to optimize a windows client for much higher speed networks (10gig+). I decided to give it a test on one of my machines with a fresh install of Windows. Worst case I could just scrap it and reinstall.
Using this I managed to increase my write throughput via Crystaldiskmark from about 5gbps to 17gbps (SMB Multichannel via 2x10GbE links).
Also increased my single stream performance via iperf3 from about 500-1000mbps to 7gbps.

 

[NickF]

I'd very much recommend giving this a read:
https://community.spiceworks.com/to...-season-003-w11-smb-performance-where-are-you
(it's a multi-parter that goes into detail on the entire TCP stack)

There was a lot I didn't know here, and it was an excellent learning resource.
(this part in particular)

Near the end he publishes a script that is designed to optimize a windows client for much higher speed networks (10gig+). I decided to give it a test on one of my machines with a fresh install of Windows. Worst case I could just scrap it and reinstall.
Using this I managed to increase my write throughput via Crystaldiskmark from about 5gbps to 17gbps (SMB Multichannel via 2x10GbE links).
Also increased my single stream performance via iperf3 from about 500-1000mbps to 7gbps.

That is a great resource thank you!