Hi all,
I'm currently on a project of migrating part of my software data from a Windows Desktop shared folder to a brand new TrueNAS server. This has to be done for multiple reasons: The desktop needs to be powered on if we want the data to be accessible, there is currently absolutely no backup of this software data as well as no disk redundancy ... Talking about a risky life isn't it :) !?
So for now, I have a Windows software which needs to access shared data on multiple computer (From 3 to 10 computers). Software is installed on all of them and they access it through a SMB share hosted on one desktop computer. This desktop is like normal stuff (i5, 16Go of RAM and shared forlder is on a single SSD) and everything is shared through the Windows UI properties.
So, I've got myself a small server with a brand i5-4670, 32GB of RAM and two Samsung 860 SSDs connected to a LSI HBA flashed in IT mode. I've installed TrueNAS over ESXi following thoses two guides and a lot of reading on this forum:
"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.
Virtually FreeNAS ... an alternative for those seeking virtualization
So I've created a VM as expected, given the FreeNAS 3 reserved Core and 22 reserved Memory, while passing through the HBA for freeNAS to have access to disks directly. And so far so good, everything is working great, I've tested data reading/writing speed on a non-compressed dataset via dd and have the good read/write performance (2x performance on read, 1x on write) on big or small files. So I decided to create the SMB share, copy all previsous data from the desktop and start the software with the brand new server !
And ... Well ... That's a fail !
While the old desktop allows me to open the data in like 2-3 seconds, with the TrueNAS server, it goes to 50-70 seconds ! To be clear, I didn't expect the server to perform better, I would be happy just with the same performances, I'm more interested in the other features like ZFS snapshots, backup and disk resilience than raw performance but ... Wow ... that's a huge difference.
Because it's build mostly for this use case, I didn't activate anything else than SMB on this dataset. The whole pool il 512GB large for 24GB of memory which as I've read in the hardware guide, may be plenty. So why those performance are so bad ? And even worse than a desktop which is not mean for that and has been around for years with a mush slower SSD.
I've testing the dataset and copied large/medium/small files over SMB but performance seems good (120MB on bigfiles, 40MB on medium and slower on small files). So Is there something I've missed in the configuration ? Or did I configured something badly to have this kind of performance ?
PS : I may test the same thing over a bare-metal installation in some days but if you have ideas before that.
I'm currently on a project of migrating part of my software data from a Windows Desktop shared folder to a brand new TrueNAS server. This has to be done for multiple reasons: The desktop needs to be powered on if we want the data to be accessible, there is currently absolutely no backup of this software data as well as no disk redundancy ... Talking about a risky life isn't it :) !?
So for now, I have a Windows software which needs to access shared data on multiple computer (From 3 to 10 computers). Software is installed on all of them and they access it through a SMB share hosted on one desktop computer. This desktop is like normal stuff (i5, 16Go of RAM and shared forlder is on a single SSD) and everything is shared through the Windows UI properties.
So, I've got myself a small server with a brand i5-4670, 32GB of RAM and two Samsung 860 SSDs connected to a LSI HBA flashed in IT mode. I've installed TrueNAS over ESXi following thoses two guides and a lot of reading on this forum:
"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.
Virtually FreeNAS ... an alternative for those seeking virtualization
So I've created a VM as expected, given the FreeNAS 3 reserved Core and 22 reserved Memory, while passing through the HBA for freeNAS to have access to disks directly. And so far so good, everything is working great, I've tested data reading/writing speed on a non-compressed dataset via dd and have the good read/write performance (2x performance on read, 1x on write) on big or small files. So I decided to create the SMB share, copy all previsous data from the desktop and start the software with the brand new server !
And ... Well ... That's a fail !
While the old desktop allows me to open the data in like 2-3 seconds, with the TrueNAS server, it goes to 50-70 seconds ! To be clear, I didn't expect the server to perform better, I would be happy just with the same performances, I'm more interested in the other features like ZFS snapshots, backup and disk resilience than raw performance but ... Wow ... that's a huge difference.
Because it's build mostly for this use case, I didn't activate anything else than SMB on this dataset. The whole pool il 512GB large for 24GB of memory which as I've read in the hardware guide, may be plenty. So why those performance are so bad ? And even worse than a desktop which is not mean for that and has been around for years with a mush slower SSD.
I've testing the dataset and copied large/medium/small files over SMB but performance seems good (120MB on bigfiles, 40MB on medium and slower on small files). So Is there something I've missed in the configuration ? Or did I configured something badly to have this kind of performance ?
PS : I may test the same thing over a bare-metal installation in some days but if you have ideas before that.
