Not Acheiving gigabit speeds

[dharmaStatus]

RESOLVED: Not Acheiving gigabit speeds

Hey all, I have installed freenas and played around with it for a little bit but i seem to be having some issues with speed. My file transfers seem to be maxed around 12 MBps (so ~100mbits /sec), on a fully gigabit network (cat 5e cables, gigabit switch, and gigabit computer) and i tested all of the components individually and manually, so its definitely the freenas thats not achieving gigabit.

I'm not sure if this is a hardware limitation of the processor or ram, or if its a driver issue.

I am running an ion board with the 1.6 ghz atom chip, 2 gigs ddr2 800, and freenas is booted off a usb flash drive. The mobo does support gigabit, for reference its a zotac ionitx-e-e.

I have freenas configured with zfs raid-z on 4 2 TB drives which are WD caviar greens.

Basically my question is if this is a driver issue, or if there is something that i am missing.

Thanks!

FIX

had to change the ifconfig to gigabit, and got an additional 2gb of ram, and ended up acheiving 30 MBps write and ~68MBps read averages

 

[ben]

Almost certainly due to RAM and/or processor resources. ZFS is barely stable with the amount of RAM you have.

 

[ProtoSD]

I agree with Ben, also which version are you running, the i386 or the AMD64? I think that board/cpu will run the AMD64 if you're not already using it. Get some more RAM...

 

[dharmaStatus]

Ya I'm running the AMD64, good to know I guess I didn't do my homework correctly. I'll have to get another 2 gig stick, thanks guys!

I'm going to pick up the ram later tonight, so i'll post back on the results later today

 

[matthewowen01]

wait wait wait.....

you're getting almost exactly 100/mb. I'm a believer in coincidence but come on. ssh into your server and run 'ifconfig' look at your NIC in the Media section and tell us if it's detecting as gigabit, or 100/mb. if it's gigabit, look down the line to every device, is all of your networking equipment gigabit? did the client detect as gigabit?

more ram is always good though.

 

[dharmaStatus]

I have tested every component of the network and they are all gigabit, the only thing that has not been tested to see if its gigabit is the NIC of the system with freenas, it supports gigabit, but I haven't checked if its recognized as such. You would thought that is the first thing I checked but didn't get around to it as I was in a rush. I'll make sure to report back

 

[warri]

I have a similar setup and can achieve between 30-50 MB/s over gigabit network. So it's most likely not a RAM issue.

 

[marcusmarcus]

I have a similar setup and can achieve between 30-50 MB/s over gigabit network. So it's most likely not a RAM issue.

I have a similar setup to you but I have 4GB of RAM and 35-50MB/s over gigabit network. I'm surprised yours is that quick with 2GB RAM using ZFS. I would think if the OP added more RAM he would see faster speeds. I'm curious how fast yours would be if you had more RAM as well. What kind of drives do you have?

 

[dharmaStatus]

Ifconfig reveals all

looks like its not configured for gigabit, here is the relevant line under nfe0

media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex, flowcontrol, rxpause, txpause>)

so i ran a

ifconfig nfe0 media 1000baseTX

Its been at it now for about 5 minutes trying to run that command, i'm going to go pick up 2 gigs ram while thats running. Not sure why its taking so long

 

[dharmaStatus]

Another two gigs of ram, plus having the ifconfig set properly is working great now! Averaging about 68 Mbps, thanks all!!

edit: To clarify its averaging 68 MBps for read, for writing its at about 30 MBps, which is triple what i was getting write, and over 6 times the performance for reading

 

[marcusmarcus]

Check my findings out here on some settings I tested http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?1226-Hyper-threading-and-Prefetch
This may also boost some of your network speed. I was only getting 35-50 MB/s read and write speed to and from my FreeNAS system before tweaking (usually closer to the 35MB/s). After the tweaks though, I am getting 60-70 MB/s writing to my FreeNAS and 70-80MB/s reading from my FreeNAS. I have an atom based processor and it may help improve other atom based processor systems, not sure how it would effect higher performance CPU systems.

 

[dharmaStatus]

That seems very strange that a CPU feature would improve disk write speed, regardless I tried what you mention in the thread and did some limited tests didn't really seem to have much effect.

I think the only reason i'm not getting better performance is because most of my cat 5e cables lying around the house are pretty low grade, i've run some benchmarks on them before and at most they acheive about 600 mbits / sec, most have an average performance lower then that. I'm going to pick up a bunch of nice ones from monoprice when I do another big order from them.

 

[jgreco]

Ethernet is all digital. Look for errors on the interface. If there are no errors, you can get the Gold Infused Monster Cable Special Edition Cat 9 Ethernet cables for $999.99/each and they're no better than the 50c Barely-Cat5 cheapies imported from China. It's all about whether or not the interfaces are getting the data. You can run GigE over completely crappy cable over short distances and be just fine.