More Memory?

[Chris Hoeschen]

How do I know if my FreeNAS has enough RAM? I built my first FreeNAS box and loaded it up with my data. Opening one of my CIFS shares takes a minute or two to load the entire list of folders (over 1,300 folders.) Since I don't know what is expected for performance I don't know if this is normal or a sign I need more memory. Here are my specs:

SuperMicro X10SLM
Pentium G3420 3.2GHz
Crucial 16GB ECC RAM (PC3 12800)
RAID-Z2 across 6 4TB drives (14.5 TB available space)

As for the network it is connected at 1Gb and I get close to 100MB/s data transfer rate over the wire.

Attached is the recent view of the memory reporting. I see it is reaching the max, is this an indication I need more RAM or will FreeNAS just suck up all the RAM it can get?

 

[jgreco]

It'll suck all the RAM it can get. There are some threads about CIFS performance with large numbers of files, and I don't recall the details but I seem to recall memory isn't the issue. You may need to twiddle some other bits.

 

[DrKK]

You have plenty of RAM sir. Definitely not the problem. Assuming you're not using dedup or doing something else stupid.

 

[SweetAndLow]

do you have 1300 folder in one folder? I have a feeling that is going to be slow no matter how much hardware you throw at it.

 

[esamett]

+1. I'm am not familiar with CIFS but it does seem to work differently than Windows in handling files and directories. Delays occur that wouldn't happen with just windows file stuff. I also found that CIFS got really slow after doing alot of file transfers. Rebooting the server and PC helped. I put in a ticket.

 

[Knowltey]

Your RAM *should* be fine. If you are experiencing performance issues though I would look into troubleshooting other hardware and ruling those out before determining that a RAM upgrade would resolve whatever issue you are having.

 

[Chris Hoeschen]

I let this sit for awhile and now when I open my share it will pop up very quickly. It does load slow if I just reboot FreeNAS and it is the first time opening this share (FreeNAS building the cache perhaps?) but after that it goes quickly again.

 

[jgreco]

That would be expected; the ARC cannot cache data until it has been read once. After that it will make an effort to cache whatever seems to be needed the most.