Slow File Transfer to NAS

[Sir_Redrum]

I have just setup FreeNAS 8 onto my new NAS (see sig for details) and I am getting extremely slow transfer speeds from my desktop to my NAS.

Both my desktop and the NAS have gigabit NICs and my router (Billion 7800N) has gigabit ports. My desktop is connected to the router via CAT5 and the NAS is connected via a CAT6 cable.

There is only 1 hard drive in the NAS at the moment and is formatted for UFS.

I have setup a network share for windows. I can see it fine on my Windows 7 64bit but when I drag an 8GB file into the share, it only copies it across at 3-4MB/s which I think is very slow.

I read a lot of threads here first so when I setup the share I enabled Large RW Support, Send Files with sendfile(2) and enabled AIO.

Any ideas on what to check for? I am new to FreeNAS so learning a lot along the way with lots of research.

 

[matthewowen01]

that's a Very low end box. you need no less than 2 GB of ram, I'd highly recommend 4-8. that's also a very low end cpu. I'd bet more memory would give you an order of magnitude increase but i doubt you'll see real gigabit speed with that setup.

 

[Sir_Redrum]

CPU should be fine as I checked the processes and it wasn't using a whole heap while transferring. Benchmarks have this CPU outpacing the Intel ATOM CPU's in the QNAP units etc. So extra RAM helps speed up file transfer over the network?

 

[matthewowen01]

no, extra ram allows zfs to work properly and access files at decent rate. thus allowing you to move files at a decent rate.

 

[Sir_Redrum]

Ok, I'm just a little confused. So even though my drive is formatted for UFS, ZFS is involved as well?

 

[Sir_Redrum]

WOOOOOHHHOOOOOOOO. I added 8GB of non ECC RAM and it changed speeds to average about 10MB/s (it was about 3-4MB/s).

It was an improvement but not enough. I then formatted the drive and created the volume again using ZFS rather than UFS and now I am averaging between 80-90MB/s :D

So Happy now.

 

[nismohks]

WOOOOOHHHOOOOOOOO. I added 8GB of non ECC RAM and it changed speeds to average about 10MB/s (it was about 3-4MB/s).

It was an improvement but not enough. I then formatted the drive and created the volume again using ZFS rather than UFS and now I am averaging between 80-90MB/s :D

So Happy now.

hey mate,

i have a microserver too and am running:

8gb usb generic for freenas 8 amd64
4x 2tb seagate 5900rpm
2x4gb kingston ecc dd3

and am getting write speeds of only 23MB/sec and read of 11MB/sec

what did you do to make it faster?

ive got enable AIO, large RW support, sendfile(2) to ON in CIFS (only service im running) and i dont have power savings on my hard drives.

any help please??

 

[marcusmarcus]

AIO actually slowed transfer rates on my system. When I disabled it it went much quicker.

 

[nismohks]

for me, disabling AIO reduced throughput by a few MB/sec :(

ive also got this in the network interfaces tab under options "media 1000baseTX mediaopt full-duplex"

should i just get rid of it?

 

[Sir_Redrum]

Hi Nismohks,

Can you detail how you have your hdd's setup (i.e UFS or ZFS)? Are you using a RAIDZ pool at all with those 4 hdd's? The media 1000baseTX etc is just telling it to use full Gigabit speeds. I haven't even bothered setting up a network interface and mine works fine.

Also can you please elaborate on your network setup (i.e what is your desktops NIC, what router or switch are you using)?

 

[nismohks]

Hi Sir_Redrum,

So ive been away and have just come back playing with this.
Ive recreated the volume and all that and it seems to be working fine now.

I can now copy large files (like a 1gb file) to the microserver at 60-70MB/sec and im quite happy with that, but when i tried to copy my music library over (100GB of MP3 cd rips etc) it would only copy at 10MB/sec.
i know small files would be a lot slower but i didnt quite expect it to be THIS slow.
This is done after mounting the volume as a network drive in Win7 x64 and doing a windows copy.

I enabled Large RW Support, Send Files with sendfile(2) and enabled AIO in freenas8, should i look into any other settings?
i read somewhere that i may have to force a particular read speed or sector size for WD drives?
i know im using seagates so just curious if that applies too

Thanks for your help!

Any suggestions?

 

[ProtoSD]

How are you copying your files? are you using CIFS? I think CIFS doesn't perform well with lots of small files like mp3, so that could be your problem.

 

[nismohks]

yer im using CIFS.

if that is the problem, is there a better solution?

i also have over 700GB of photos i wanted to backup on my freenas...

 

[ProtoSD]

What file system are they stored on NTFS or FAT32? You could just put the disk in your FreeNAS box, mount it from the command line, and then use rsync to copy everything. Beta-5 which should be out any day now might have fixed the problem of not being able to mount your disk from the GUI. Let us know if putting the disk in your NAS is something you want to try and then we can work out how to do the rest.

 

[nismohks]

nah, id rather not put the disk in the box as this would be an ongoing thing since im a photographer and i would want to have a copy of my photos on the freenas at all times....

is there any other way?

 

[matthewowen01]

moving small files sucks. you can tar them, move them, then untar them

 

[nismohks]

damn :(
guess ill just have to wait it out then...

another question, is it normal that when i do a singly 1gb transfer i hit 80MB/sec, but when i do a big copy of 400GB or files over 300MB i only get around 45MB/sec?

and i just found out freenas uses a crapload of ram.... im doing the 400GB transfer now and its using 6GB of my ram! :P

 

[matthewowen01]

damn :(
guess ill just have to wait it out then...

another question, is it normal that when i do a singly 1gb transfer i hit 80MB/sec, but when i do a big copy of 400GB or files over 300MB i only get around 45MB/sec?

and i just found out freenas uses a crapload of ram.... im doing the 400GB transfer now and its using 6GB of my ram! :P

yes it is, the 45 MB/s is about as fast as your hardware can go and the 80MB/s is when your system still has free cache that can be filled first. ZFS uses most of your free memory as cache, so if you have 8 GB of ram, you've got about 6-7 GB of cache which gets used. in other words, the first 6 GB gets written as fast as it can, after the cache is full, the disk becomes your bottle neck.

 

[nismohks]

ahh thanks, youve been very helpful!

also last night when i was doing a 400gb transfer the windows7 copy will spit an error every 45 mins or so saying that the freenas directory wasnt available
i've mounted my freenas as a network drive in win7 (V: in this case) but each time the file copy drops the freenas is still up and running as i can still access the web manager and can see that its fine.
When i press try again in windows it will resume like nothing has happened.

any idea what may be causing this?
is it because of my CIFS settings?

currently i have ticked:
-large rw support
-send files with sendfile(2)
-support dos file attributes
-Enable AIO
-Minimal AIO read size 1
-Minimal AIO write size 1

thanks

 

[Winol]

Hey there.

I have an HP proliant Microserver also and I'm running into some Issues.

Specs :
Freenas 8.0.1 BEta 4 AMD64
2x4GB ECC Kingston DDR3
4X2TB Caviar EARS
RAIDZ-2 ZFS = 4TB


When I use FTP to transfer my files over a Gigabit Switch (the Switch is OK I tried to configure a Laptop to laptop Gigabit FTP Transfer and I hit 800Mbits/s) it timeout and bug ...
If I shape the FTP client to 100Mbits, the FTP transfer is ok .... I have enabled Jumbo frames on both laptop and freenas (MTU 9014).
In short the FTP transfer didnt work that great. I didnt even try with CIFS,NFS or whatever !

I then tried to use a fresh install with Freenas 8 and a brand new hard drive (Same Model) .
The drive is also formatted as ZFS .

I'm now running FTP transfer at 35MBytes/sec which is 280Mbits/sec ...

Where can you guys get 80 or 90 MBytes / sec using the same hardware ? (only the disks change... I think my Drive can go faster than 280Mbits / sec )


Any guess ?