sluggish MS Office file r/w

[tl5k5]

Hey all,
I've got a FreeNAS VM on Proxmox.
The SAS controller has pass-through and everything tested fine so I put it into production at our small office. Some co-workers have noticed that some times opening or saving Microsoft Office files directly on the FreeNAS will take several seconds (5-10). Our previous server this same work would be instantaneous.
Does anyone have an idea on where I should start the troubleshooting?

The Proxmox has 10Gb connectivity. The client Window's machines will sustain 100+MBps r/w speeds.
FreeNAS has two 6 drive RAIDz2 vdev's. 6 vCPU, and 36Gb for RAM.

Thanks!

 

[Chris Moore]

Is it possible that the system is doing a sync write instead of asynchronous?

 

[tl5k5]

@Chris Moore I'm no expert when it comes to FreeNAS. Can you point me to where this is located and how to change if needed? Google shows some command line options.
Thanks!

 

[Chris Moore]

It is covered as part of the creation of the dataset in the manual: http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#create-dataset

I was also thinking that something in the virtualization layer may have caused the communication to the NAS to be synchronous.
I don't know about Proxmox.
Is it possible to test the FreeNAS on bare metal?

 

[tl5k5]

Thanks...if it were a snake...
I have set Sync to disabled on the dataset and asked a co-worker to test it.

I can test bare metal if ALL else fails. I over bought so I could run a hypervisor. I hope I can figure this out! :-/

I appreciate your help!

[UPDATE]
Co-worker reports back that the issue is still there.

 

[tl5k5]

@Chris Moore should I consider a ZIL?

 

[Chris Moore]

If there's anything in this configuration that is forcing sync write, a Separate ZFS Intent Log (SLOG) would be an answer.
There are some configuration options we could look at first, but I have seen write performance improve with a fast SLOG.
The model number escapes me at the moment, but the new servers we ordered at work are coming with the DC (data center) PCIe Optane drives.
It is supposed to be around 20Gb/s of goodness.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[tl5k5]

Ok...I'll have to pick this up Monday.
I'll be a client site Friday.

Thanks!

 

[tl5k5]

So help me out with this.
The last thing I tried before leaving on Thursday was to disable atime on the dataset. After doing this, I've had zero complaints from my co-workers about file access.
Can someone explain atime to me and how this could have made a difference?

Thanks!!

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Can someone explain atime to me and how this could have made a difference?

atime is time the file was last accessed/read. If you have clients scanning the drive trying to determine if files are changed based on access time, that could cause a lot more activity on the share. Just pulling a directory in file explorer could very well change the access time if that option is enabled.

 

[tl5k5]

Well, the only thing I can think of is the way they work within MS Office. When they Save, Save As or Open, they get an MS Office browser window that opens up to the NAS share which shows all the files. There can be several hundred files in these locations. When they Save or Open a file...that's when the sluggish behavior happens. With atime now turned off, no more sluggishness...for now.

 

[Chris Moore]

So help me out with this.
The last thing I tried before leaving on Thursday was to disable atime on the dataset. After doing this, I've had zero complaints from my co-workers about file access.
Can someone explain atime to me and how this could have made a difference?

Thanks!!

That is one of several standard tips to improve responsiveness from the NAS. With atime enabled, the system is recording the time that the file was last accessed, every time the file is accessed. Word creates a temp file in the same folder where the file being edited is and updates that file every few seconds. That means Word is writing to the NAS and the NAS is updating atime every few seconds for every Word file that is open. Double work. Disable atime and the NAS stops recording last accessed time, so the work is cut in half.

 

[tl5k5]

Here I am coming back to my original post.
This issue never got totally fixed.
Currently, I have Freenas running on bare-metal and I've installed an Optane m.2 on a PCIe card for a ZIL...and I still have sluggish write speed.
Bare-Metal:
FreeNAS-11.1-U6
Intel Xeon E5-2640 v4 @ 2.40GHz (10c)
64GB RAM
10Gb Myricom
Reading MS office file speed seem okay, but not great. Writing out small (2-4MB) xlsx files is painfully slow.
Any more ideas?
@Chris Moore

Thanks!!!

 

[Chris Moore]

Here I am coming back to my original post.
This issue never got totally fixed.
Currently, I have Freenas running on bare-metal and I've installed an Optane m.2 on a PCIe card for a ZIL...

Did someone suggest using ZIL (more properly called SLOG in this case) because you have ZIL (ZFS Intent LOG) all the time but it is normally a part of the main data pool but when you put in a separate device, then it becomes a "Separate LOG" device instead of being inside the main pool. The thing that having a SLOG improves is synchronous writes. If you have sync disabled, or if the type of traffic is not synchronous, SLOG serves no purpose at all. We would have told you if you asked. The thing that would probably help more is having more RAM or some other tuning.

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. How many concurrent users are you dealing with?

 

[tl5k5]

Thank your for the clarification.
From when you talked about a SLOG from post #7, I had it in my mind to at least give it a try.
I did change the writes to synchronous, without any improvement.
We have a very small office, so only 5+/- at once. During my testing I only have one system active.
Is there any information that I'm not providing that could help with diagnosing this?

Thanks!