Slow Cifs speed

[deranjer]

Hello, having a small issue with my new freenas box, which is replacing my old SMB server.

My Hardware

Asus C60M1-I AMD C-60/ AMD FCH A50M/ DDR3/ SATA3/ A&V&GbE/ Mini ITX Motherboard & CPU Combo
2 x 8Gig GB RAM - Patriot Gamer 2 Extreme Performance 1333MHz Enhanced Latency Kit 16 Dual Channel Kit DDR3 (PC3 10666) 240-Pin SDRAM - PGD316G1333ELK
4 x 2 TB Red NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EFRX


Hostname freenas.local
Build FreeNAS-8.3.1-RELEASE-p2-x64 (r12686+b770da6_dirty)
Platform AMD C-60 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
Memory 15966MB
System Time Sun Apr 28 19:53:32 EDT 2013
Uptime 7:53PM up 2 days, 3:23, 1 user
Load Average 0.13, 0.14, 0.15
Connected through 192.168.1.125
_____________________________________________________________________

CIFS transfer speed is slow, not sure how to improve it.

Ran these tests on my freenas box.

dd if=/dev/zero of=./testfile bs=1M count=10K && dd if=./testfile of=/dev/null bs=1M && rm ./testfile
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes transferred in 75.371520 secs (142459887 bytes/sec) 135 MB/s
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes transferred in 12.118545 secs (886031961 bytes/sec) 844 MB/s


iperf


On my client Windows box
iperf.exe -c 192.168.1.125

On myFreeNAS box
iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 192.168.1.125 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.104 port 52848
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 107 MBytes 89.4 Mbits/sec



On Windows box
C:\>iperf.exe -c 192.168.1.125 -t 20 -i 2
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.125, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[164] local 192.168.1.104 port 52980 connected with 192.168.1.125 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[164] 0.0- 2.0 sec 21.8 MBytes 91.5 Mbits/sec
[164] 2.0- 4.0 sec 21.8 MBytes 91.3 Mbits/sec
[164] 4.0- 6.0 sec 21.4 MBytes 89.6 Mbits/sec
[164] 6.0- 8.0 sec 21.1 MBytes 88.5 Mbits/sec
[164] 8.0-10.0 sec 21.3 MBytes 89.5 Mbits/sec
[164] 10.0-12.0 sec 21.5 MBytes 90.1 Mbits/sec
[164] 12.0-14.0 sec 21.6 MBytes 90.7 Mbits/sec
[164] 14.0-16.0 sec 20.9 MBytes 87.8 Mbits/sec
[164] 16.0-18.0 sec 21.8 MBytes 91.4 Mbits/sec
[164] 18.0-20.0 sec 20.4 MBytes 85.6 Mbits/sec
[164] 0.0-20.0 sec 214 MBytes 89.6 Mbits/sec


SMB Tests

Test file is a 1.85G m4v file


SMB read(to freenas, varies ~45MB/s, almost always starts out around 90MB/s)
SMB write(to freenas, starts out about 12MB/s end at about 20MB/s)

On my ubuntu client, both speeds were slightly lower on average


Ran the same tests on my old SMB server...

Old server specs:

iperf ~ 200 Mb/s

dd if=/dev/zero of=./testfile bs=1M count=10K && dd if=./testfile of=/dev/null bs=1M && rm ./testfile
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 178.177 s, 60.3 MB/s
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 142.944 s, 75.1 MB/s


SMB read (to local host ~50MB/s)
SMB write(to server ~33MB/s)

 

[cyberjock]

C-60s aren't powerhouses. Your dd test, although faster than 1 single Gb link, is barely faster. This means that when you add in CIFS and read/write overhead that's not linear performance will drop by as much as 50%. I'd say you are getting about what would be expected for a C-60.

If you install an Intel NIC, you may see performance improve a little.

 

[ProtoSD]

Did you read the "sticky" post below and try anything from that? There are at least a half dozen threads on bad CIFS performance with stuff to try if you search.

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?5338-Browsing-directories-slow

 

[deranjer]

Did you read the "sticky" post below and try anything from that? There are at least a half dozen threads on bad CIFS performance with stuff to try if you search.

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?5338-Browsing-directories-slow

Yes, I did see your post about the tunables.. I did exactly as shown in your examples (although I have 16 gigs of RAM, not 8), and added the aux parameters for CIFS. Since my original post I saw that there were a few more things to try, like "Support DOS File Attributes" (turned off) "Hostname Lookups" (turned off), and added "max protocol = SMB2" to the aux settings, and overall it seems my upload speed to server bumped up to about 25MB/s, but other than that, no improvement.

C-60s aren't powerhouses. Your dd test, although faster than 1 single Gb link, is barely faster. This means that when you add in CIFS and read/write overhead that's not linear performance will drop by as much as 50%. I'd say you are getting about what would be expected for a C-60.

If you install an Intel NIC, you may see performance improve a little.

I do have a PCI NIC card, will most likely work.. do you think dual nic's would speed it up much, esp if the bottleneck is the CPU?

 

[cyberjock]

Nope. CPU limits can't really be worked around. Intel NICs do take some of the network loading off of the CPU(as opposed to Realtek). You can expect some speedup, but not more than probably 30%.

 

[ProtoSD]

Yes, I did see your post about the tunables.. I did exactly as shown in your examples (although I have 16 gigs of RAM, not 8), and added the aux parameters for CIFS. Since my original post I saw that there were a few more things to try, like "Support DOS File Attributes" (turned off) "Hostname Lookups" (turned off), and added "max protocol = SMB2" to the aux settings, and overall it seems my upload speed to server bumped up to about 25MB/s, but other than that, no improvement.

I'm sorry none of things helped much. I meant to thank you earlier for doing all that testing and demonstrating that you did some research before you posted, that doesn't happen often.

I'm not sure what else to suggest right now . Did you adjust the settings to compensate for the extra RAM you have? Did you try Autotune? Sometimes people get lucky and it actually does come up with some better settings. Make a backup of you settings if you decide to try that just in case that doesn't help. Hopefully when FreeNAS 9.1 comes out, it will have the latest CIFS and it will perform a little better.