Link Speed / Performance

[Nick Marques]

Hi all,

Have FreeNAS running on a VIA EPIA-SN. I just got it up with a CIFS share and my initial tests aren't showing very fast performance.

When I run ifconfig, I get this:

Code:

vge0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=389b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC>
        ether 00:40:63:f2:a6:63
        inet 192.168.10.50 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.10.255
        nd6 options=9<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED>
        media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
        status: active

So it looks like it is in gigabit full duplex mode, but I am only getting 10 MB/s max transfer rates. I would expect at least 50 MB/s. I get about 80 MB/s or more out of a different NAS.

The share is ZFS, no compression. There aren't any other users yet until I get this configured and working.

Any ideas? Could this mean I need more RAM installed?

 

[krikboh]

It appears that board only has 4 GB of RAM and FreeNAS with ZFS requires a minimum of 8 GB. The CPU is also under powered for CIFS. I'm actually surprised FreeNAS even booted.

 

[cyberjock]

Any ideas? Could this mean I need more RAM installed?

No, the system as a whole is not really fit for FreeNAS.

 

[Nick Marques]

Well besides transfer rates, it seems to be doing OK. And it was previously a Linux based NAS anyway, so I figured I'd give it a shot. And, right now, it only has 512MB RAM in it. I have 4GB on the way.

I don't necessarily need to do ZFS. I could do UFS, perhaps configure as RAID5?

If I don't use FreeNAS, what are my other options? Just install Ubuntu or something and share a volume?

 

[Yatti420]

You could run UFS but you'll lose ZFS self healing etc..

 

[Nick Marques]

Understood. Given this is a 6-7 year old product I am trying to repurpose, I don't expect it to do any more than it did out of the box with the OEM Ubuntu install. It really just had a single CIFS share on it designed for use with Windows Media Center.

 

[cyberjock]

And 32 bit and UFS is dead with FreeNAS now. The project manager was discussing this a week or two ago (and again last night) that 32 bit is gone.

 

[Yatti420]

And 32 bit and UFS is dead with FreeNAS now. The project manager was discussing this a week or two ago (and again last night) that 32 bit is gone.

I meant to type this aswell :)

 

[Nick Marques]

Oh how things change. I really just went to FreeNAS as I remember it being pretty awesome about 5-6 years ago without very strict hardware requirements. I guess software changes with hardware. Any suggestions with putting this motherboard to use? Maybe just plain Ubuntu linux or another NAS distro?

 

[gpsguy]

You might try NAS4free (nas4free.org).


Sent from my phone

 

[Milkwerm]

or http://www.openmediavault.org/ from the original author of FreeNas (pre version 8). it's debian based. (as you said you had Ubuntu on that board before)