Slow catalog navigation (SMB)

[rar]

hi! I have installed FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 on Athlon 64 4000+, 2GB RAM, 2*2 TB mirror (only 900GB used), 1GB lan.
One SMB share, only guest access. After start in 5-10 minutes all works good and fast, but after 10 minutes navigation is VERY slow. If i open a directory - it's so-so speed, but if i want go back into previously directory it's VERY slow. Sometimes it's a few minutes.
Files copying is very fast ~40MB/sec.
In WebGUI in Processes i see 270-300 sleeping processes, but in top and ps aux i only see 50 sleeping processes. Screenshots later.
Sorry for my English))) Please help me to solve problem.

 

[Ericloewe]

Athlon 64 4000+, 2GB RAM

There's your problem. You're running one quarter of the minimum amount of RAM and the processor is ancient. LAN is probably Realtek, which helps to explain the crap 40 MB/s transfers.

 

[no_connection]

From what I understand the root problem is the way samba handles extended attributes, which is bad, like horribly bad.
I would guess you run out of metadata cache which means all that IO for checking those attributes falls to disk.

That said, being an unsuitable system to start with don't help ether.

I tried to get an old system with 2GB RAM and 2.2GHz celeron to run FN, mainly to convince a friend that NAS is the way to go before I can get him to invest in proper hardware.
I gave up as using 32bit FN didn't give me much benefit, and with no ECC I couldn't use ZFS so I went with Debian instead. Which also gave me an excuse to spend the hours needed to learn it.
Performance didn't improve though. My patience may have improved, but my view of linux didn't.

 

[L]

with a small system you can also use freebsd does quite well on tiny memory images. I have seen sometimes dramatic perf improvements from zol to freebsd.