Seeking Help with Slow Speeds (Can Pay)

[SangieWolf]

I have tried many things to figure out why my FreeNAS is extremely slow reading and writing files and why SMB sharing isn't working but AFP works great (still slow though). I am willing to pay someone to remote in and snoop around. Do I need more RAM? Another CPU? What can be done?

Any application I use on my Mac that has files on the share drag and freeze. Sometimes just to open a folder takes 5-10 seconds.

I used to use OpenZFS locally on my previous Mac with zero issues and it worked fast. I have gigabit wiring so it's not wireless. I'm not sure where the bottleneck is.

I've added several screenshots but I've recently updated to FreeNAS-11.3-U1 and still no changes. I'm getting tempted to get a USB 3 drive and just attach it to my router...

 

[sretalla]

What model are your 6TB NAS drives (are they WD EFAX)?

What kind of file structure do you have... large numbers of very small files, small numbers of very large files, a mix, something else?

What have you done to attept to set up SMB (we know AFP will be slow)?

What services do you run on the FreeNAS?

 

[SangieWolf]

What model are your 6TB NAS drives (are they WD EFAX)?

3x HGST HUS726060AL and 1x ST6000VN0033-2EE (I had bad sectors on one of the HGSTs and had to replace it with a Seagate)

What kind of file structure do you have... large numbers of very small files, small numbers of very large files, a mix, something else?

Large number of files under 100 MB. There are some larger files but not much.

What have you done to attept to set up SMB (we know AFP will be slow)?

AFP should be multi-threaded transferring. You're saying SMB would be faster on my iMac? All I did was make sure the SMB service is enabled and it is. It stopped working after an update.

What services do you run on the FreeNAS?

AFP, SMART, SMB. I was trying to use Plex for a bit but disabled it awhile back.

 

[Constantin]

Calling @anodos, my recollection is that AFP is single-threaded? (Ditto SMB)

Also, are you running AFP and SMB on the same shares? If so, that might be part of the problem. Having two file sharing protocols have access to the same file is a potential recipe for trouble - even if oplocks or other mechanisms prevent two users from accessing and changing the same file at the same time (potential for data corruption!), there is a performance penalty.

If possible, I would disable either AFP or SMB globally and see if performance improves. If transfer improves significantly, then I'd try to standardize on one or the other file transfer protocol. For example, I thought OSX Mojave would force me to adopt SMB-only access to my NAS but TimeMachine, etc. still work great on AFP alone. So I will stick with AFP until I switch to Catalina or higher.

Also, I'd also investigate the NICs and make sure they are performing as intended. For example, LACP/LAGGs/etc. can be a real pain. Your NAS is so limited, I would only connect one NIC at a time unless you want a failover config and even then I'd double and triple check that the thing is performing as intended. The ASRock board in my old XL+ confused the living daylights out of me re: its failover LAGG non-performance. My current SuperMicro board works as intended.

So if you have the two NICs in your NAS attached to a single switch, disconnect one of the ethernet wires and see if the performance improves. If it does, review the LAGG/LACP settings. For a single Z1 VDEV using spinning media, you are unlikely to see read/write performance much past 1GbE, so a failover LAGG is as far as I'd push it.