Slow CIFS Performance on FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 WoodCrest Dual Xeon Server

[MuneebMufti]

Hello. Guys I am seeing slow performance on my FreeNAS system . Its an old Woodcrest based Xeon system. I have Dual Xeon 5130 in it along with 8GB ECC Ram. I am using onboard NIC its Gigabit (server is acually hp xw6400 machine). In it, I have 4 drives in Raid Z1 mainly because the drives are 250 GB 7200 RPM drives each connected via SATA 2 (old salvaged drives).

The server is connected to my Router which is Linksys EA4500 which has giagbit ports. No other systems in my home is connected via LAN. In my home all systems are Laptops and we use "n" WIFI on 5GHz network. My laptop has intel wifi 7260 card (which supports 300Mbps on N and much more on ac but my router is only n) With me sitting 10 feet away from router when I transfer large file around 4 GB I get sustained speeds of 11 to 13 Mbps according to windows explorer file transfer box when expanded to show transfer speeds.

Can anyone tell me if its normal due to server being old or due to usage of Z1 on 4 drives or because there is no wired connection and laptops are using wifi to communicate or because the drives are old their performance may have degraded over time? BTW SMART tests show all drives are OK and healthy. If thats not the case I would really appreciate if someone can help me improve my speeds

Edit: Before going with FreeNAS i had windows installed on this machine and network stats showed that it was connected with 1000Mbps connection so the network cable is good

 

[Yatti420]

Wifi is horrible.. You need to have a wired gigabit computer to test with.. I have wireless clients.. ~1600kb/s on old hardware.. Very slow..

More ram if you find performance is sluggish when everything wired..

 

[MuneebMufti]

Wifi is horrible.. You need to have a wired gigabit computer to test with.. I have wireless clients.. ~1600kb/s on old hardware.. Very slow..

Thats True ... ill do some wired tests too but for the sake of conversation for wifi is that acceptable speed or even for that its low considering i am sitting 10 feet away from router and there is no wall between it and my laptop and i have full signal strength

 

[cyberjock]

Thats True ... ill do some wired tests too but for the sake of conversation for wifi is that acceptable speed or even for that its low considering i am sitting 10 feet away from router and there is no wall between it and my laptop and i have full signal strength

No way to know. That's why we tell people to test with wired connections. If you can get 100MB/sec through Gb and then 13MB/sec when on wifi, you know what the problem is. ;)

 

[MuneebMufti]

No way to know. That's why we tell people to test with wired connections. If you can get 100MB/sec through Gb and then 13MB/sec when on wifi, you know what the problem is. ;)

okay thank you ill repost the results here if i get slow speeds on wired connection.

 

[mauirixxx]

Hello. Guys I am seeing slow performance on my FreeNAS system . Its an old Woodcrest based Xeon system. I have Dual Xeon 5130 in it along with 8GB ECC Ram. I am using onboard NIC its Gigabit (server is acually hp xw6400 machine). In it, I have 4 drives in Raid Z1 mainly because the drives are 250 GB 7200 RPM drives each connected via SATA 2 (old salvaged drives)

I salvaged an old HP xw8400 that came with dual 5160's. Using 6*1TB drives and 16GB of FB-ECC ram, and the single NIC embedded on the mobo I easily saturate that gigabit link (took roughly 7 hours to transfer 2.5TB worth of videos). Like everyone has stated, use a hard wired link to test.

Wi-Fi is good enough to stream Plex and browse the web - anything more serious and I'd get a wire.

 

[MuneebMufti]

I salvaged an old HP xw8400 that came with dual 5160's. Using 6*1TB drives and 16GB of FB-ECC ram, and the single NIC embedded on the mobo I easily saturate that gigabit link (took roughly 7 hours to transfer 2.5TB worth of videos). Like everyone has stated, use a hard wired link to test.

Wi-Fi is good enough to stream Plex and browse the web - anything more serious and I'd get a wire.

Thanks for the input guys. I checked via wired connection turns out my laptop has 100Mbps LAN. ill wait for my brother to come around in couple of days his laptop has Gigabit lan. and check file transfer speeds and if its still slow ill post it here.

 

[Idiotzoo]

I find wifi rarely achieves the rated speeds even under what appear to be ideal conditions. Worth noting that since the move to samba4 cifs performance is vastly improved in freenas. I used to see parity in performance between my virtual windows servers and my freenas box, which was always disappointing. Now I find I can saturate the Gbe link even when moving relatively small files.

If wifi performance is important to you it's worth checking what other networks are around. If your router can see other networks on the same channel then it will degrade performance gracefully to share bandwidth. If there are other networks on adjacent overlapping channels your router will see a load of noise and network performance will be terrible. Best bet is to be on a different, non-overlapping channel from other networks if possible.

That said 5ghz is far less congested, but still no guarantees.

One practical test you can do is see what the cpu usage is like when transferring a file. If it's sky high then samba could be struggling on your hardware.

 

[MuneebMufti]

I havent checked the wired connection yet. I will do some tests tomorrow. I did notice one thing. I have ownCloud setup in Jail using Nginx the method posted here on the forum. i put 500 mb single file in my local account and it was synced by the owncloud windows client. I checked the network throughput via task manager windows 8.1 it should me average speed of file transfer arounf 70 to 80 Mbps. Thats quite fast and file transfer completed quickly and the CIFS over wifi is around 13 mbps. Maybe CIFS and mapped network drive speed is generally slow? and yes I am using 5ghz network and there is no other 5ghz device around me so channel is all clean. ill do some wired tests to check the reason for slow transfer over CIFS.

I find wifi rarely achieves the rated speeds even under what appear to be ideal conditions. Worth noting that since the move to samba4 cifs performance is vastly improved in freenas. I used to see parity in performance between my virtual windows servers and my freenas box, which was always disappointing. Now I find I can saturate the Gbe link even when moving relatively small files.

If wifi performance is important to you it's worth checking what other networks are around. If your router can see other networks on the same channel then it will degrade performance gracefully to share bandwidth. If there are other networks on adjacent overlapping channels your router will see a load of noise and network performance will be terrible. Best bet is to be on a different, non-overlapping channel from other networks if possible.

That said 5ghz is far less congested, but still no guarantees.

One practical test you can do is see what the cpu usage is like when transferring a file. If it's sky high then samba could be struggling on your hardware.

 

[cyberjock]

Uhh... 70-80Mbps is only about 10MB/sec. Do not confuse MB and Mb.

Owncloud also does some compression and other factors, so you can't exactly do an easy apples-to-apples comparison.

 

[MuneebMufti]

Uhh... 70-80Mbps is only about 10MB/sec. Do not confuse MB and Mb.

Owncloud also does some compression and other factors, so you can't exactly do an easy apples-to-apples comparison.

LOL my mistake ... clearly i need to do wired connection tests. thank you for the input

 

[Ames]

This appears to be common issue, as I have the same performance issues with freenas 9 versus 8.

 

[mauirixxx]

Could be the hardware. While I'm only running gig-E (can't afford 10gb-e), I've got 0 performance issues with any version of 9 I've used. And this is using realtek NIC's and cheap "green" Trendnet 8 port gigabit switchs. My hardware ranged from a dual core Athlon 5000, to the dual 5160 Xeon beast I salvaged, to an AMD FX-6300. The dual core Athlon tapped out at around 70-80MB/s, where as the other 2 systems easily saturate a gigabit link, all 3 servers tested via CIFS.

 

[solarisguy]

I am routinely moving around (using CIFS) 40GB files. The difference I am seeing is that a Realtek NIC could not approach 100MB/s, while an Intel NIC gives me 110MB/s