HP microserver N36L slow

[mpc]

I've got a HP microserver N36L (1.3 Ghz dual core, 8GB ram) with 3x4TB hard drives in raidz1 running FreeNAS-11.0 and I'm getting slow read and write speeds (25MB/s) over a gigabit network. I used to run windows 7 as a file server on this machine with 4 GB ram with 250 GB OS drive with 2x2TB drives for shares and that could saturate a gigabit network.
I've tested the network speed with iperf and it give a speed close to a gigabit speed.
I've tested the pool speed with dd and i get 52 MB/s write and 130MB/s read.
Does anybody know why I'm getting these slow speeds? Each drive when tested in a windows machine had speeds af around 150 MB/s
The CPU usage goes up to 100% on 1 core when running dd or when copying over the network the same is seen for smbd.
People have reported getting full gigabit speeds on these machines. Is ther anything I can do to increase these speeds?

Thanks

 

[joeschmuck]

You didn't specify the protocol you wer using but I suspect it could be NFS.

The good thing is iperf is telling you that you can get the 1gbps speeds, the bad thing is you are likely limited by your protocol. Yes, it's a guess on my part due to lack of information. Until you specified the iperf results, I jummped to the WiFi mindset because so many people use WiFi and wonder why things are slow, thankfully this is not you.

If you are using SMB, please respond with all those wonderful details. Be as descriptive as possible including how you are testing and only getting 25MB/sec. If you are transferring a lot of small files, that could also explain it. This is why we like it when someone uses iperf.

 

[mpc]

I'm using SMB. I tested the speed by copying a virtual box image over to the network share, Ive also ran blackmagic disk speed test set to 2GB file size which gives the same result. I'm not sure if it makes any difference but all the test have been ran on a macbook pro. I've also connected a single 2TB WD black drive and it gives the same read and write results as the raidz1 pool when tested with dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/"pool"/x/testfile bs=1024 count=50000 and dd if=/mnt/"pool"/x/testfile of=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=50000

 

[gpsguy]

SMB on FreeNAS works best with a fast CPU. As I recall the CPU speed on the N36L is only 1.3GHz.

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm not sure if it makes any difference but all the test have been ran on a macbook pro.

Sometimes it does unfortunately but I wouldn't think you would be getting 25MB/sec, it should still be much faster, like I said unless you are transferring lots of small files.

Could you try both a different machine instead of the Mac and a direct Ethernet connection? Try to take these two items out of the problem to try and narrow down the issue.

 

[praun]

I've got a HP microserver N36L (1.3 Ghz dual core, 8GB ram) with 3x4TB hard drives in raidz1 running FreeNAS-11.0 and I'm getting slow read and write speeds (25MB/s) over a gigabit network. I used to run windows 7 as a file server on this machine with 4 GB ram with 250 GB OS drive with 2x2TB drives for shares and that could saturate a gigabit network.
I've tested the network speed with iperf and it give a speed close to a gigabit speed.
I've tested the pool speed with dd and i get 52 MB/s write and 130MB/s read.
Does anybody know why I'm getting these slow speeds? Each drive when tested in a windows machine had speeds af around 150 MB/s
The CPU usage goes up to 100% on 1 core when running dd or when copying over the network the same is seen for smbd.
People have reported getting full gigabit speeds on these machines. Is ther anything I can do to increase these speeds?

Thanks

Did you ever find a solution to your problem?
I have the same machine, and I wanted to Install freenas on it. But these speeds are not acceptable for me, so I just wanted to know if you where able to fix it

 

[JaimieV]

Did you ever find a solution to your problem?
I have the same machine, and I wanted to Install freenas on it. But these speeds are not acceptable for me, so I just wanted to know if you where able to fix it

I’ve recently retired my N36L and N54L but I easily got 100+ megabytes/sec out of them both using the built in Broadcom NICs, five HDDs in raidz1. I didn’t have to do anything special to get that. 12gig RAM. SMB,

(The N54L only got up to about 120megabytes/sec when trialling an Intel 10gigE adapter - still five HDD’s in raidz, I didn’t experiment with eg three 2xmirror vdevs for max speed.)

Currently using cheap old Dells as per sig, and getting up to 700megabytes/sec over SMB :) they’re nearly as quiet as the Microservers too after judicious bios/iDrac tweaking, though rather more thirsty for watts.