Solidworks sharing performance.

[Cmleschak]

Just built a system to replace our failed Buffalo NAS that was a performance hindrance since day 1. We have 2 Solidworks users, Large assemblies of small files that all need to open rapidly.. The transfer speed for general storage seems pretty good, but when I open or save a large assembly in solidworks it bogs right down..

XEON E3-1240v5 3.50ghz, 16gb ECC Ram, 4 1TB Samsung Enterprise SSD HD's in a Z1 configuration (planned on adding a hot swap and probably a bank of HDDs to do weekly backups.

1 main volume
2 datasets
1 for company data (accounting, invoices, general data)
1 for Engineering storage (Solidworks files, drawings, pdf files, CNC files, etc)

Shared as windows SMB and mounted on the computers as a network drive.

Again, normal performance for just dumping all of the existing files to the dataset went reasonably quickly, but Solidworks performance is worse than the Bufallo NAS was (running windows server) Cant find much with a search

 

[kdragon75]

You could look at some options like disabling caching of data on the company dataset to allow more space for the Engineering storage. Also RAIDz1 is not ideal for high IOPS, generally mirrors are much better for this. You would lose 1TB moving to mirrors from your current configuration but SSDs are getting so cheap that if you have a business case of any kind, it's not hard to justify. You may also consider testing NFS performance/compatibility though then you need to concern yourself with a SLOG device as NFS as I recall defaults to sync writes.

Edit: Before someone else says it, more RAM will help too. I would move to 64GB. This will give much more room to cache project files.

 

[Cmleschak]

You could look at some options like disabling caching of data on the company dataset to allow more space for the Engineering storage. Also RAIDz1 is not ideal for high IOPS, generally mirrors are much better for this. You would lose 1TB moving to mirrors from your current configuration but SSDs are getting so cheap that if you have a business case of any kind, it's not hard to justify. You may also consider testing NFS performance/compatibility though then you need to concern yourself with a SLOG device as NFS as I recall defaults to sync writes.

Edit: Before someone else says it, more RAM will help too. I would move to 64GB. This will give much more room to cache project files.

Well right now I am on a bit of a shoestring budget. It was like pulling teeth to get the boss to ok the hardware I already purchased. RAM for this motherbord is expensive. There are only a few listed working sticks and I originally tried to purchase 2 16gb sticks of samsung ddr4 which would not boot. I had to RMA that and order a compatible stick which is about $230 for 16gb. Right now $700 for a ram upgrade is not in the budget. Again, lets keep in mind that a bufallo Terrastation handled this on much less hardware with about 20 times the performance I am currently seeing. Honestly it would be cheaper to buy a windows server license than upgrade ram to make freenas work.

I can try mirroring, I wont use this data up for a long time, our total server usage up to this point is only about 20gb (8 years worth of company data) and although we are growing much faster now, I think I am safe for a while. Cad files just arent that big so its not a huge storage issue. I did want extra storage to back up local workstations regularly too though.

I just have a hard time believing that with SSD hard drives the performance can be so slow when our Terrastation is using much lesser hardware, HDDs, and runs circles around this.

 

[kdragon75]

It seems like the meta data is what's choking it. There my be better or other samba options to tweak.