poor performance

[l@e]

Hi all, just installed on a SM X9SAE 12G Ram (didn't have more at the moment) CPU E3-1240.
the MB has 2 Intel Gbe Ethernets, 4x1 TB WD RE4 7200m, 64M cache USB 8G for the system.
1 - installed the last version downloaded from the web.
2- created the Volume using cpu encryption. it took like 14 h to initialize it.

directly started with samba testing and I was expecting better than the 54 MB/s I could get.
I was transferring large files (1-4GB) and it was constant 52-54MB/s.
I had still 1GB of RAM free,
I thought of the encryption was lowering the performance so I recreated the volume without it.
Surprise: Same speed.
So finally I tested my PC to another PC both win 8, and for the same files the speed was more than 80 MB/s.
also made a dd in Freenas to test the internal speed of Volume and it was surprising high 260 - 340 (by creating different file sizes with dd) tested different configurations of RAID -Stripe,Mirror, Raidz, 10.

any idea what is the bottleneck in this system?

 

[joeschmuck]

The only thing I can think of is a network issue. Set up a RAIDZ1 using all 4 hard drives, do not encrypt. Make a direct ethernet connection between your PC and NAS (hopefully you have static IPs assigned). Transfer a large file over SMB and see what you get.

Your internal speed is typical for a SATA II connection speed.

 

[l@e]

I did it before. Same thing. I have 24 port gig cisco so no switch issue.
The strange thing is that for an intel nic i can understand 10-20% loss but 50% is to much even for second hand nics.
Also samba is using only one core of 8. And that during copy was just 25-27 % load.



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[joeschmuck]

When you say you installed the latest version of FreeNAS, which version is it? 9.2.0-Release or is it one of the Alphas? Also the 25-27% load seems about right. Mine runs about 22% but I do have a different CPU. Have you tried to replace your ethernet cables? If that doesn't work the only thing I can think of is your NIC.

Maybe someone else will have a suggestion.

 

[Rand]

Can you try with another OS? Linux Live cd maybe...
What brand of network card is in your pc? Cyberjock just found a 50% performance loss with a realtek nic in another thread;)

 

[cyberjock]

Can you try with another OS? Linux Live cd maybe...
What brand of network card is in your pc? Cyberjock just found a 50% performance loss with a realtek nic in another thread;)

Yeah.. because of the Realtek on the CLIENT, not the server!

 

[joeschmuck]

The OP has clearly stated he's using the on board NIC with is Intel, however in my opinion it could be faulty. I mean, there isn't much else to point a finger at here.

 

[cyberjock]

joeschmuck,

Might want to scroll up as you might not have seen my post. The problem wasn't with the server. It was actually the client's NIC that was making the server appear to have poor performance. But, since the client's NIC does have an impact on the benchmark results and such, his NIC sucked so badly that it was actually the problem. As soon as he dropped in a spare Intel NIC he went from about 517Mb/sec to 950Mb/sec+.

 

[joeschmuck]

Can you try with another OS? Linux Live cd maybe...
What brand of network card is in your pc? Cyberjock just found a 50% performance loss with a realtek nic in another thread;)

Yeah.. because of the Realtek on the CLIENT, not the server!

These are for a different user, different thread, right?

joeschmuck,

Might want to scroll up as you might not have seen my post. The problem wasn't with the server. It was actually the client's NIC that was making the server appear to have poor performance. But, since the client's NIC does have an impact on the benchmark results and such, his NIC sucked so badly that it was actually the problem. As soon as he dropped in a spare Intel NIC he went from about 517Mb/sec to 950Mb/sec+.

Did I miss something here?

 

[Rand]

These are for a different user, different thread, right?

Did I miss something here?

Yes and no ;)

It is another thread and another user but it *might* be an issue - thats why i was asking for more info on the other side of the problem;) Server might be perfectly allright and client might be an 386 runnin Win 3.1 for all we know:p
Actually we know its Win8 so it wont be an ancient machine but you catch my drift?;)

 

[l@e]

I did test my pc. It is not the problem. I have written that to the first post.
I will test tomorrow with a pci nic, and if still the same issue will go to test the machine with windows or linux.



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[Rand]

Yes you did win2win test i know but thats unfortunatly not *really* applicable here:/

And i hope you dont use a pci nic but a pci-e nic;)

 

[TheSmoker]

I did test my pc. It is not the problem. I have written that to the first post.
I will test tomorrow with a pci nic, and if still the same issue will go to test the machine with windows or linux.



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What brand of network card you have on the pc wich is acting as client?

And BTW after a bit of fiddling around I can manage between 850 and 950 MBps with a "crapaltek" (pun intended) card on Win 7 ;)

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[l@e]

The client is hp xw8200. The nic is onboard intel.


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[Rand]

Hm...
for larger files RaidZ should behave best so I'd keep that for now for testing as Joe hass already recommended
That should cover the server's end.
On the client...
For Win 8 i usually had more or less decent smb copying in my tests and there is no free nfs client included any more unless you have win8 enterprise.
You can try checking mtu (jumbo frame) settings on NIC/Switch/FreeNas .. whether its 1500 or 9k it should be the same everywhere.

Then test something easier like ftp to see whether that yields better results ... If yes then its indeed a smb issue...

 

[joeschmuck]

First, based on what you have told us from a hardware perspective, you should have very good throughput on your FreeNAS system.

To recap:
You are running on a SM X9SAE with an E3-1240 CPU with 12 GB RAM.
The MB has two built in Intel NICs.
You have a RAIDZ1 configuration using four 1TB WD RE4 7200m drives.
You have FreeNAS-9.2.0-RELEASE installed on a USB Flash drive.
You have connected the FreeNAS machine directly to your Windows test machine with a single Ethernet cable and got ~55MB/sec using a Windoze copy.
You have replaced that Ethernet cable with a different one and yielded the same results.
We are making an assumption that your Windows computer is capable of full Gb transfer rates.

Questions:
1) Was that a write to the FreeNAS or reading from FreeNAS? Writes to FreeNAS are normally faster than reads from FreeNAS due to the RAM cache, up to a certain point.
2) During a write to FreeNAS does the transfer rate peak at the beginning and slowly settle out? What is the peak and how long does it last?
3) You have two NICs built in, have you configured and tried the second NIC?

Post the following information please... and use CODE brackets.

Code:

zpool status
dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
dd of=/dev/zero if=tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
rm tmp.dat

Note: insure you are in a directory in your pool before running the dd tests. Each test could take more than 5 minutes to run, it depends on how fast your system is. Since you have SATA II I suspect it will take ~6 minutes for the first dd test and ~5 minutes for the second dd test.

I recommend you use a bootable (Live) Linux Distribution, pick one. Boot your Windows (Test) computer from it and then see how fast files transfer. This is what Rand expressed above and it takes your Windows 8 OS out of play.

At this point, pending the results of the requested information, I believe the Windows machine or your network are at fault.

 

[l@e]

Joe i almost tried today everything of you say.
Did also another test from a another machine hp running win 8 to. Intel nic.
Writte to nas was starting at 102MB/s and after few seconds dropped to 80-82, with few drops to 60 when changing files.
Read from nas was steady at 90-92 MB/s.
I have redone the storage just as one striped volume assuming that will be the max performance.
Also redid write to nas from both of the machines. Clients.
The max bandwidth was round 800Mbps on nas nic.
So the first that initiated the copy dropped from 80 to 60 when the second one started copying. Second one copy speed was 25 - 30 MB/s.
I saw in processes monitor 2 samba with different loads but not more than 30% of cpu.
I will post later what you asked. Im on the move right now.


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[joeschmuck]

I think you are doing fine with your results for the FreeNAS machine, those are good values. If you want to test the maximum throughput for your FreeNAS machine, create a singe UFS drive and share that. There is no ZFS overhead this way. Copy your files. Any limitation you see will be outside your FreeNAS machine based on the speed results you just posted.

 

[l@e]

joe here is the result of your commands:
[root@n] /mnt/ZFSVOL/DOC# zpool status
pool: ZFSVOL
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
ZFSVOL ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/e15cb77e-798f-11e3-ba14-002590a9a690 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/e1ae0801-798f-11e3-ba14-002590a9a690 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/e2061d65-798f-11e3-ba14-002590a9a690 ONLINE 0 0 0
gptid/e2545aea-798f-11e3-ba14-002590a9a690 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
[root@n] /mnt/ZFSVOL/DOC# dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 234.273052 secs (458329208 bytes/sec)
[root@n] /mnt/ZFSVOL/DOC# dd of=/dev/zero if=tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 249.673426 secs (430058513 bytes/sec)

the disks seems ok, what do you think?

 

[joeschmuck]

I think your system is faster than mine. Also I'm sure you know this but I will post this for anyone else thinking they have an issue... Transferring lots of small files will always result in slower throughput unless you just have a super fast system on both ends.

Try out the UFS as I suggested above if you want but I think you actually have a very good FreeNAS server.