Slowdown and access issues - Am I just being stupid or is something wrong?

[Strohminator]

Hi all

It's my first post here - and thanks for putting up a support forum!!

First and foremost, I'm more of a hardware guy -- though, while I can't claim to be a power user by any stretch of the imagination, I can usually fumble my way through most software issues and get them fixed in a reasonable amount of time, but this NAS unit of mine has me absolutely stumped. I don't know the first thing about Unix and I don't seem to be getting the concept of console commands (primarily because the FreeNAS guide seems so vague and apparently assumes that everyone who uses FreeNAS knows Unix / Console commands / File systems / Network sharing rights and all the associated jargon off by heart)

Please help - I've been struggling with this NAS for 5 days now, and I'm about to chuck yet another mouse against the wall in utter frustration...

Quick rundown on hardware:

i7 920 CPU
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard (10 SATA ports were instrumental in my decision)
18 GB RAM (3 x 4GB & 3 x 2GB)
10 x 3TB drives (8 Western Digital reds, 1 x Western Digital Green, 1 x Seagate ST3000DM001)
700w CoolerMaster Silent Power PSU
Nvidia GT210 GPU

I've configured the drives as a single RAID-Z2 volume... CIFS sharing

Created a single share for configuration, creating folders, etc - called it Aresconfig with the path /mnt/Ares

In there, I created Audio, Video, Apps, Gaming and Literature folders

After a lengthy trial-and-error session, I configured a user and group called guest, assigned permissions, etc. Got sharing working, put in a couple of optimization parameters, and had the system start auto-tuning..

Started copying from my old NAS - went at 55MB/s all the way - which was the limit of throughput for the old unit.

Then started emptying out the drives on my PC's - 100MB/s on average, great... emptied out two drives this way.

I then created shares to each of the folders mentioned above, and started copying my series drives over to the NAS... loads of files, and it starts slowing down.

Restart the system just to be sure of everything, and here's where I am now - Folder browsing on the NAS starts off quick - but large folders take a while to index... Try to copy something, and everything goes to hell - copying to the NAS takes a while to "Calculate" the sizes, and then even large files go at 15-25MB/s... Try doing anything during this, and the NAS access is slooooooow - the little green progress bar up top in the path block in Windows just takes forever to fill up and index a new folder.. Also, when trying to copy something, it just says "Calculating" forever, until the copy times out, and it Windows says it's having difficulty accessing the file in question.. Which ALSO incidentally stalls any copies to the NAS, making you have to go cancel them, etc.

With nothing copying to / from the NAS, I still can't get a video to open or copy a single file FROM the NAS... I can write to it, albeit stupidly slowly all of a sudden - and I can create / delete folders.

Using my media player (Mede8er 500X2), I can access series and movie files perfectly, and play them back.

What am I doing wrong? And why has it only surfaced now that I've already put my entire bloody HD movie collection on it (and sold my old NAS already) ??? :( :(

Do I need to reconfigure shares from scratch? Is there a hardware issue? Or does this sound like a re-install FreeNAS and import the volume situation?

I've even considered that the NIC chip / CPU / Southbridge on the motherboard might be overheating, and fitted a True Black cooler to the CPU + fitted 3 more fans to the case to make sure there's ventilation everywhere..

Someone please help - I hate feeling this far out of my depth - especially when my data's at stake. :(

 

[ProtoSD]

Read this thread, don't just try the settings.

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

 

[Strohminator]

Thanks protosd

I've read the thread, but my problem is that I have no idea what any of these settings do - sure, I can decipher that they're mostly buffer related..

I've got the following loaded as tunables now:

Code:

vfs.zfs.arc_max 12162695914 Generated by autotune

vm.kmem_size_max 16892633216 Generated by autotune

vm.kmem_size 13514106572 Generated by autotune

kern.ipc.nmbclusters 10000

vfs.zfs.txg.write_limit_override 1073741824

vfs.zfs.vdev.max_pending 1

vfs.zfs.vdev.min_pending 1

kern.ipc.somaxconn 384

kern.ipc.nsfbufs 150000

net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable 1

net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto 1

net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_auto 1

net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack 0

net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max 2097152

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf 2097152

net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max 2097152

And the following parameters in CIFS settings:

Code:

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=2097152 SO_SNDBUF=2097152
read raw = yes
write raw = yes
max xmit = 65536
getwd cache = yes
max protocol = smb2

I have the following enabled under CIFS:

Localmaster
LargeRW
Sendfile 2
EASupport
DOS File Attribs
Allow Empty password


Browsing does seem to be a bit faster.. thank you for that... but copying to the NAS is still hanging around 25-30 MB/s - I was copying the same sized files at 100MB/s as recently as yesterday??

I've scheduled Smart checks, done a scrub, etc... all seems fine.

Also, copying from the NAS still says "Calculating", then eventually it times out saying "there was a problem accessing \\ARES\Aresconfig - make sure you're connected to the network, and try again" - and it does this on both my PC's..

I'm really sorry, I know I'm being a pain in the backside - but I really don't understand the jargon or what most of the commands do - hell, I'm pretty sure my issue with copying from the NAS is related to some kind of sharing stuff-up / authentication issue/ permission gone wrong... Please draw me pictures and hold my hand through this - or I'll even set up so you could remote in and see what I've stuffed up here? I'm at a complete loss here and feeling stupider than I have in years. I absolutely friggin hate struggling with something like this - especially considering I've just downgraded from X79 to help fund this little affair. :(

I'm on Skype as well - philip.versfeld

Thanks in advance.

 

[Strohminator]

Update - the inability to copy is only for large files... if I drag over a small Excel file or whatever, it copies perfectly... but large 100MB+ files just time out and don't copy... could anyone shed some light as to why that is?

 

[Strohminator]

Let it be known that Noobsauce80 is a friggin prince amongst men... He just sacrificed over 3 hours of his time on a Teamviewer session to fix my mess ups, configure my PC's NIC properly and teach me a bit more on setting up FreeNAS shares properly... :o

Thank you so so soooo much bud... You're a legend. If ever I could somehow return the favor, just say the word.

 

[ProtoSD]

All hail "The Sauce" Nice job

 

[survive]

Hi Strohminator & Noobsauce80,

So what was the problem? Was it any one particular thing or a whole bunch of general tweaking?

-Will

 

[cyberjock]

He wasn't thrilled with the performance, so he started tweaking and tweaking. We got rid of all of the tweaks first. That didn't fix his performance issues. Next we fixed his permissions since he had messed them up pretty good trying to increase performance. We knew something was up after we removed the tweaks and fixed permissions and he got 12MB/sec on 1 computer but on another computer it transferred at over 70MB/sec through the same network switch. I looked at his NIC settings in Windows and started disabling stuff that can hurt performance. In particular, the green features were enabled by default. We disabled it and all of his speed problems were gone.

One of his machines also had an Intel NIC while the other had a Realtek. Naturally the Intel NIC did not have any green features and gave great speeds and the Realtek sucked badly performance-wise and had the green features enabled.

 

[FrancoTheTanko]

I'm having the same exact problem as Strohminator. I can write to the NAS at a slower rate than normal and it times out when I try to copy from it. I tried all the settings above but they didn't work so I gave up and started fresh.
I'm running FreeNAS-8.3.1-ALPHA-r12813-x64

I started off with creating a guest account will full control then set all the following:

Permissions for each volume:
Owner (user): guest
Owner (group): guest
Mode : 0777 (all 9 boxes checked)
Type of ACL: Unix
Permission reclusively set when I saved changes but the box does not stay checked.

CIFS Shares:
Browsable to Network Clients
Expert Recycle Bin
Allow Guest Access

CIFS Services:
DOS charset: CP437
Unix charset: UTF-8
Log Level: Minimum
Local Master
Time Server for Domain
Guest Account : guest
Send files with sendfile(2)
Zeroconf share discovery
Hostnames lookups

I then went to check the permissions for the files and folders in Windows and "Everyone", "guest(Unix Group\guest)", and "guest(NAS\guest)" all had special permissions, not full control. I then set full control for all three of these accounts. I'm not sure what else I need to do.

On a side note, I set up an FTP account and that works perfectly so I've been transferring files that way...

Any progress on this problem will be greatly appreciated!

 

[cyberjock]

You shouldn't be using an alpha release if you aren't fluent in using FreeNAS. It's important that you experience with FreeNAS so you can identify when you are making a mistake and when you find a bug.

You should start a new thread since your issues aren't likely to be related to his issues unless you know you made the same mistakes. Of course, if you know you made the same mistakes then you wouldn't be posting because you'd already have the solution.

 

[FrancoTheTanko]

noobsauce80, you were right. I just rolled back to FreeNAS-8.3.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r12825) and the problem went away. I hadn't tried that because I had the "Welcome to nginx" message problem and I could do nothing to fix it but I guess it's all good now.