SOLVED SMB shares dropping during write

[achillesheald]

Hi all- appreciate the community here. It's been helpful to me as a lurker during my recent FreeNAS build, however I'm encountering issues with SMB that I haven't been able to google myself through. I have a pretty basic flat home network, and am using my NAS primarily for media storage/Plex streaming initially while I learn the BSD ways of doing things. I flip between a PC and Mac, and my wife uses a Mac exclusively, so I went forward with creating SMB shares for file management. In the process of converting my high fidelity audio library from AIFF to FLAC (due to Gracenote's frustrating incompatibility w/ BSD), I've been doing a bunch of read/writes from my Mac that fail intermittently. After transferring typically 40-60% of the files, it'll pause and timeout. Most of the times, the whole share hangs until I disconnect and reconnect.

I've chased this rabbit at a bunch of layers so far- from trying to limit other operations on the NAS (maybe choking off SMB because it's single-threaded in BSD?) to upgrading other elements of my home network (recently upgraded all of my UTP to cat 6) in case it was a bandwidth issue. The NAS is a recent build with parts I had access to, however components are typically not server-grade. Any recommendations on where to start troubleshooting- whether it's logs on FreeNAS itself or something client-side?

I am far more familiar with Linux than BSD, so if I certainly don't consider myself to be above overlooking something simple. Open to any suggestions.

System Specs:
- FreeNAS 11.2 Release U1
- PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5-9600
- MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte Z390
- RAM: 16 GB G.Skill DDR4-2666
- Storage: Samsung SSD (boot/OS); 4x4TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives (RAIDZ2)

 

[dlavigne]

Anything in /var/log/messages when the transfer stalls? Also, what is the full output of ifconfig within code tags?

 

[SweetAndLow]

I would suggest taking everything back to factory defaults. We have no way of knowing everything you have changed at this point. The fact that samba is single threaded is not revalent. It's not a bottleneck for anyone in your situation. My samba can easily sever 10gbps. Are you using WiFi? 90 of your problem could be terrible WiFi. It's not built for speed or reliability, it's built for ease of use.

 

[rungekutta]

Could well be this known problem, basically SMB with Mac clients is very problematic/unstable since 11.1-U5 and until the fix gets released.

 

[achillesheald]

Thanks all for your replies. No messages in /var/log/messages, and I have everything near default with the exception of some user permissions. Shouldn't be a WiFi issue though that is what I'm using- I just upgraded to a new mesh system and I've been very pleased with performance so far. It's a good troubleshooting suggestion though, so I'll find my ethernet adapter and test that.

 

[rungekutta]

WiFi was probably just a wild guess and it shouldn’t cause this sort of problem unless you have lots of other symptoms too. However as mentioned FreeNAS has major issues with Macs and SMB in current versions (11.1 and 11.2). Try setting sysctl net.inet.tcp.reass.maxqueuelen=16384 and reboot and see if that changes anything for the better - if so, you had run into the same issue as many others and this will be fixed in future versions.

 

[achillesheald]

Thanks @rungekutta- I've followed up and tracked the discussion around this topic and it rings true with what I'm experiencing. I've increased the queue length w/ the command line and by placing something in /etc/sysctl.conf, but both changes were wiped out on reboot. Ultimately I configured a sysctl tunable using the GUI and it works like a charm. Thanks all for your assistance!

 

[rungekutta]

Yes, I think a lot of people have problems with this actually. Hope it gets fixed soon in an official release.

 

[riggieri]

I would like to confirm as well, this fixed my issue with SMB transfers randomly dropping out on 11.1-U6.

 

[wodnevets]

I had the same problem when migrating all my data to my TrueNAS over SMB. I used Total Commander to move large amounts of data to my NAS. You can move files sequentially by choosing move F6 and then F2 Queue.

 

[anodos]

You didn't have this same problem. IIRC this problem was caused by a FreeBSD networking bug that was fixed in a subsequent minor release.

 

[wodnevets]

I had the same problem as my SMB shares dropped during write. But yes you are correct it was a different issue...

 

[Ericloewe]

It's really not productive to necro threads for long-solved problems with drive-by suggestions for software that answers the question "what if UX design hadn't progressed since 1995". Since it's clear that the issue this thread is about has been solved, I'm closing it. If you wish to discuss the issue you encountered, please open a new thread and provide context and details for others to understand your situation.