Infosys and TrueNAS, performance drop

[mirko2511]

Hello everyone, I am a new user of the FreeNAS system, and I am in desperate need of help.

So far, at our company, we have been using FreeNAS as a server with a standard installation, consisting of 1 SSD for the system and several HDDs in RAID, and everything was working great. We work with the INFOsys accounting software, which uses a shared folder located on the TrueNAS system. From there, the INFOsys software is accessed by all computers in our company, allowing them to access the database and make changes according to user accounts.

Some time ago, the TrueNAS Free server stopped working. I purchased a new server computer, the Intel Xeon E5 2660 V4 with 24GB of RAM. I installed TrueNAS Core on a 120GB SSD and added another 260GB SSD for shared folder space, which is only 20GB in size. The INFOsys program constantly transfers and receives many small files over the network, making it slow. However, since setting up TrueNAS Core, the INFOsys program is now at least 200% slower, and I'm not sure if the issue lies with my configuration.

Yesterday, I bought an Intel Xeon E3, installed a 120GB SSD, and an additional 512GB SSD for storage. I set up TrueNAS Scale and disabled file compression, although I'm not sure if that was a wise decision.

I would like to start from scratch if any of you can provide advice on how to proceed. Everything is connected through a 1GB/s network, while INFOsys can operate on a 100MB/s network as well.

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[ChrisRJ]

I daresay this is first and foremost a support case for the software provider. (The approach to using a shared folder as a means to have fat clients access a database, was a bad idea 30 years ago, and seeing this still today makes me sad.)

The accounting software provider needs to be able to tell exactly what they require from such a shared folder. Without that information you are only digging around with relatively little chance of success.

 

[sretalla]

I purchased a new server computer, the Intel Xeon E5 2660 V4 with 24GB of RAM

What will be really important to understand is the network interface that system has... if it's Realtek, expect issues. If it's Intel, probably OK to look at other things, but a pool of a single SSD should provide enough IOPS to match the software's needs in most scenarios (seems similar to what you would have been doing before with better performance under FreeNAS).

 

[mirko2511]

I have 2 intel network adapters.
But i have 1 of them using dhcp, dynamic ip adress, and second one using static ip adress so we never lose connection.
Problem is, when i set up static ip adress, nas dont have access to internet, but it must have it since im making daily quest for one drive to push files online as backup.
My ip adress range is on 192.168.0.100 right now, but in future it will be 10.0.0.1 , and.im using 10.0.0.5 as static ip on server.
Maybe someone can help me to configure network so only one network is used .
Software providers tells me that it is rly important to give maximum administrations to pc that are accessing shared software, so there is small time being spend for pc and serwer to go true authentifications...
Im not sure how it was, i cant find the guy that made free nas first time, so im here in big trouble. :)

 

[mirko2511]

Tho, i need to mention that copying bigger files from pc to true nas scale is working good, around 110mb/s and for this network it works good in my opinion..

 

[ChrisRJ]

Software providers tells me that it is rly important to give maximum administrations to pc that are accessing shared software, so there is small time being spend for pc and serwer to go true authentifications...

Sorry, but that is utter nonsense coming from the software vendor.

If they have a requirement in the direction of performance, which would indicate a serious flaw in their application design, they must be able to quantify it. Along the lines of e.g.

• The max. latency between client and server must not exceed x milliseconds.
• The minimum available network bandwidth must be X Mbps.
• The server must be able to respond to request XYZ in x milliseconds.
• The client must have the following hardware specs and network configuration.
• ...

Turning off security to gain speed is a no-go. Apart from the legal and compliance side (for you and them), with today's hardware (i.e. anything not older than 5-10 years, depending on the details) there is no reason do that in almost any scenario.

To narrow things down, I recommend to test things with a network share provided by a Windows machine, ideally a server version. There are minuscule differences between Samba and Windows and it wouldn't be the first badly written software to stumble over those.

 

[mirko2511]

I will test it as soon as posible.
In my opinion, just optimising NAS to be able send and receive a lot of small files in the best transfer rate that i can accomplish should maybe fix the problem.
Is there a way to tune this up somehow?
If i try to just copy paste that files that usually software seeks from shared folder, takes me almoust 2 hours at aproh 1mb/s
Thank you for your time, any suggestion is werry welcome

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

@mirko2511 You cannot have two interfaces connected to the same network unless you configure LACP with a matching LACP capable switch. Because that would introduce yet another layer of complexity to your setup I strongly advise to connect only one interface for the time being until all other issues are solved.

 

[mirko2511]

Thank you all for your help.
Since I opened this topic, I've been working 20 hours a day to find the best solution.
I tried Windows Server, FreeNAS, TrueNAS, and TrueNAS Scale. I even bought 5 different computer configurations...

The winner is the following:
Standard computer with an Intel i5 3470 processor and 16GB DDR3 RAM, with an integrated LAN card on the motherboard.
2 SSD hard drives of 120GB in a mirror configuration for boot, and 2 SSD hard drives in a mirror configuration for data, one is 480GB and the other is 512GB.
Two datasets have been created - one exclusively for the Infosys database, and the other for sharing large files between computers.
I need to mention that i always used same SSD drives on all systems and PC configurations, i also tried version without mirror, and i trzed RAID also...

I truly don't understand how I5 3470 that has 4 cores and 4 threads useing DDR3 RAM modules outperformed the server-grade Intel Xeon E5 2660 V4 that has 8 cores and 16 threads with 24GB DDR4 RAM and an external Intel PCI Gigabit port.

The system that convincingly won in copying small files is TrueNAS Scale. I always used the same folder with 39,000 files, around 250 MB size in total, in every test:
FreeNAS took 4.5 minutes, TrueNAS took 3 minutes, and TrueNAS Scale finished in about 1 minute.
Infosys software works best with TrueNAS Scale and this i5 3470 configuration.

Now, I've solved most of my issues—fast file copying, uploading files to Microsoft OneDrive—there's only one remaining...
Until now, the server was connected to a TP-Link 1Gb/s, and the TP-Link was connected to a Cisco switch that had a 100Mb/s connection, and all the computers were connected through the Cisco switch.
This allowed smooth operations, as 10 computers at 100Mb/s could easily congest the flow from the server at 1000Mb/s.

I'm trying to create a gigabit network. I thought of using the D-LINK Switch DGS-1016S/E, which is unmanaged.
However, to prevent congestion in the middle of high data flow from multiple computers to the server, I am considering installing a PCI-e LAN card with a 10Gb/s throughput in the server, hoping that this will prevent them from overwhelming the server.
Please, I would like your suggestion and opinion to solve this last problem. Thank you in advance.