Poor Up and Download Performance with Mac and AFP on FreeNAS-8.3.1-RELEASE-p2-x64

[smoeschter]

Hi Guys,

at first: sorry for my bad English.
second: My Problem
I ' have setup my freenas with an ZFS Pool as Stripe with 6 TB capacity and different Datasets and Share it over AFP in Freenas with different Users.
On this point all works fine. But if I' download a file from my freenas to may Mac with Mountain Lion I' get a download speed from 60 to 80 Mbit/s.
This is not super Fast in my GigabitLan but acceptable. If I' try to Upload a file from my freenas to my Mac I' get just a speed from arround 20-30 Mbit/s and than it fall down arround some k/bits.
I've read many post here in the Forum and I' played arround with the Sysctl in Freenas. but nothing helps.
The Second point is that im absolutley new to this and the most things I'don't understand where I' have to do the settings in freenas or in Mac.
I' have read that it could an issue by the smb settings. but I' couldn't finde it on Freenas, and if I' changed it, I' have to change it in my Mac too? If yes, where I'have to do it?

Anyway, If somebody out there who could help me to solve this problem, so please help me :o
I'm really sad and I don't knwo what I' should do. My last option is to reinstall freenas but to get this on this state today i need over a week.

So please, please help me on my Signature you see my Setup. If you need more, please ask.

Thank you in advanced for any help

 

[joeschmuck]

I would think the 1GHz C60 CPU is your limitation. If you are truly running stripe then might I suggest you run UFS format vice ZFS to speed things up considerably.

 

[smoeschter]

Hmm you're really sure? Think that is not really the reason. 8GB DDR3 RAM should good enough for an ZFS Stripe with 6TB.
But anyway it's worth to think about ufs. but where the hell should i Parked my Data? . I found some Tunables Settings from
ProtoSD. i will test it when i'm back at home. maybe it helps to increase upload speed. If not i will test ufs maybe

 

[joeschmuck]

So let's just go over this so I understand and maybe I'll point something out here for you...

Also I'm assuming you meant MB/sec, not Mb/sec. Mb/sec is too slow and I'd say you have a serious problem if that were true. My system can write to the NAS at ~ 95MB/sec (frequently peaks just over 100 MB/sec) and read from it at 70-85MB/sec in general.

1) When you write to your FreeNAS device you are getting 60-80MB/sec, not bad. I'll bet smaller files write very quick while large files are on the slower side. The higher speed writing is due to your 8GB of RAM, it helps cache some of that data. I would say you have no complaints here.

2) When you read from your FreeNAS device you are getting 20-30 MB/sec, not good at all but your RAM only helps out if the data can be cached so now you are at the mercy of your hard drives and CPU. You have a ZFS Stripe, I think that is one reason your system is slow. Error checking adds to the slowness as well. Have you tried RAIDZ1 yet to see if you can obtain any performance boost? If that doesn't work, UFS might be your only option.

So the only solutions I can think of to help you out is to try a different drive format, since you're using ZFS Stripe I would think your data isn't that important so you should just use UFS and gain all the speed you can. I think you will be surprised. The other option might be a faster system but that costs money.

You never listed what hard drives you are using...

If you are able to get it working faster, please update this posting with the solution that finally worked for you.

 

[smoeschter]

Okay Thanks for the solution.
Yes your right I mean MB/sec.
If the only solution to get on UFS I'll try it. the only problem I have is that my files allready on the NAS.
I need an External Drive to safe my Files and than to Format it in UFS. But thats a other problem :D
What made me confused is that the first Time I copyed my files the speed was okay. 50GB in arround 30 minutes.

Anyway So i will get my files of from freenas and format it in ufs.

thanks for your help :D

 

[joeschmuck]

Well did you know that if you ever have less than 10% free space then your ZFS drives will run very slow. I forget how much free space you need to restore in order to kick the speed back up. This could be your problem if you have full drives.

If it ran fast before and you haven't changed your hardware then there must be a software problem or the drives were too full. I certainly would like to see benchmarks for your system, I'm curious how your CPU handles FreeNAS.

 

[smoeschter]

No I don't but good to know ;). But in this case it is not the problem for this poor perfomance.
After i backed up my files again I made a factory reset. After this I createt a UFS Volume with the same problem. Down speed okay. Up speed is a crap.
So i think it is a software problem on freenas. Today I delete FreeNas an install it Fresh without any old configs.
Maybe this helps. I've tried to set the MTU 9000 Option in the network interfaces, but if i do this Freenas go unstable. Think this is the Realtek NIC problem.
So this way would'nt help to increase the Up speed. If I ready I will give response here.

If FreeNas should be ready and running, I'll made a Benchmarking. Maybe it will a surprise for you
I Rember that the first time I Upload my files to the FreeNas Mac shows me a Time for 500GB arround 1 hour.

 

[joeschmuck]

I think a normal MTU size is fine, shouldn't need a jumbo size at all. The RealTek should be fine as well, they are not that bad and I use them as well however you might get a boost in performance with a good Intel NIC but I highly doubt what you are desiring.

Since you have swapped over to UFS and it's still very slow then it must be something we can figure out. Can you use CIFS at all with a MAC and turn off AFP and NFS? That might help isolate a protocol within FreeNAS. Also you could try version 8.3.0 to see how it performs. And I like the fact you are not reloading any configuration files, keeping it simple helps.

So I'm not a MAC user, I'm not sure what else I can do here as I can't test like you have. One thing would be nice, give a very detailed description of your hardware and setup configuration as someone else might be able to shed light on the problem.

 

[smoeschter]

If I back at Home I will try a new install. The USB Stick is fresh and prepared for install;)
With CIFS I'll allready tryed but it was not really better. By the way, Apple and CIFS are not the best choice. NFS could be a solution, because I've not tested.
My plan is to make a first simple standart setting install with one afp share and test to copy a 10 GB MKV File to the share in ZFS and then UFS. Then the same with CIFS and NFS.
Than if it's not runnig I think abaout to test NAS4Free 9.1. Because in this is FreeBSD Version 9.1. Maybe it is a Driver Problem in the FreeBSD 8.3.X.X Version. Who knows?
After this I will try FreeNAS 9.1 Alpha. Maybe. The thing is i like the Plugins idea that isn't implemented in NAS4Free. I use ajaxplorer to get access and comfortable browsing of my Files from my workplace or
if I on a trip.
But without a good running system it made no sense to do this.

Oh and if I'm at home I'll list the Hardware én detail

 

[joeschmuck]

Sounds good. I know NFS should be the faster protocol, wish my Windows machine had it :(

 

[Paul Muller]

I have a 10GbE network setup and regularly obtain upwards of 550-600MB/s (megabytes not bits) on both reads and writes (where the array has the bandwidth).

However, I find the whole thing grinds to a halt when I try to move VERY LARGE (upwards of 70GB) complex objects such as vmware machine images or FCPX projects (smallish ones - 20GB are okay).

The ODD thing is that I do NOT have the same problem when copying those same files to a genuine Apple file server.

Is your problem also related to certain types of files?

 

[cyberjock]

Do NOT cross post.

And I had a semi-long drawn out response that got deleted because I had to give you a warning. And quite frankly, I don't feel like spending the time to retype it.

Good luck!