Stupidly Slow Speeds

[L.E.D]

I don't know why this is happening, but with my FreeNAS machine I can achieve anywhere from 10 to 200 KB/s I used to get a steady 11.3MB/s because my PC's network card has took a crap and only operates in 10/100 now, but that's not the issue the issue here is the fact that I can no longer obtain anymore then the measly KB/s as said before, I am not sure at all why this is happening,

Specs for the file server are

Intel P4 - 2.8ghz - I believe it has hyperthreading
2GB DDR memory
PCI Gigabit NIC
1TB Sata Disk
2 160GB IDE disks Raid1
1 250GB IDE disk


Network,
From the FreeNAS machine

FreeNAS -> Router -> PC
Gigabit.....................100Mb

As said before my network card has gigabit capabilities in the name but it only operates in 10/100Mb/s so that is where it is at,

If I go to the console on the FreeNAS machine, then go to the Shell I can type

ifconfig re0

And it is returned with this

[root@freenas ~]# ifconfig re0
re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=389b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST
,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC>
ether 00:14:d1:22:c2:38
inet 192.168.1.118 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
[root@freenas ~]#
[root@freenas ~]#

I can see that this end is running in gigabit, so to my PC from the Network and Sharing Center I can click on the Ethernet Connection and it displays 100Mb/s I don't think it is the router because I can plug the FreeNAS into the switch and obtain the same speed... I just thought of something that I should have before, I am going to plug the FreeNAS machine and my PC into the switch and see what happens, This will tell me if it is the router... That is going to be bad if it is, that sucker was expensive, I can say that sucks, I setup the network as mentioned and I am obtaining the 10/100 speeds, well I guess I answered it already, so, I guess I can say, let this be a guide to others, maybe a template as to what info and how much info would be great to have when answering a question on here and also try every possibility that comes to mind even if it sounds stupid try it, just don't break your hardware,

Thanks for reading this anyway,

Nathan

L.E.D

 

[jgreco]

1) Run iperf on the PC and the FreeNAS and see what speeds you get.

2) Hook the PC and the FreeNAS directly together and configure them on an IP subnet. Then run iperf again. Hooking them up with a switch that eliminates the router being in the path is not quite as good, but you can try that first if you wish.

 

[gpsguy]

2GB DDR memory is below the minimum requirements for FreeNAS. Are you using ZFS or UFS?

 

[jgreco]

Yes it is, but ~10MB/sec is probably still a reasonable expectation for an under-resourced system on a 100Mbps network, and he was getting that, so I'm fine with disregarding that aspect for the moment.

It sounds very much like the network has gotten into a more-broken state, probably losing packets or something like that.

 

[L.E.D]

Yes I am aware that 2GB's of memory isn't enough but I am not planning on more then 3 people accessing this at a time anyway, I am using UFS and ZFS for the Raid 1 but I get the slow speeds on any drive I access, If I had a full gigabit network this system would easily run 35MB/s for me but as said my network card can't run that, as for the iperf question I am not to sure how to do that I downloaded it but a windows will just pop up then close, I am not sure what I am supposed to do with that,

As for the switch, it started to work fine but the speeds just got crappier over time... and are again in the KB/s range.

Thanks

Nathan

 

[ProtoSD]

as for the iperf question I am not to sure how to do that I downloaded it but a windows will just pop up then close, I am not sure what I am supposed to do with that,

Hmm, I recall a section in the FAQ that covers how to do this.

 

[gpsguy]

Since it sounds like you have a couple of pc's, run your tests using one of the other one's.

 

[jgreco]

Hmm, I recall a section in the FAQ that covers how to do this.

You mean this one maybe? In the worst case scenario, install FreeNAS to a second USB drivekey and stick that in another machine. The text mode iperf is perfectly suitable for purposes of network debugging, though obviously if your problem is rooted in a problem with networking on Windows, then bypassing that will mask the problem.

 

[L.E.D]

Well I have found it out with some reading and re-reading but here it is,


Iperf thread stopped [CAUSE=Stream Closed]
bin/iperf.exe -c 192.168.1.118 -P 1 -i 1 -p 5001 -f M -t 10
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.118, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 0.06 MByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[148] local 192.168.1.6 port 49991 connected with 192.168.1.118 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[148] 0.0- 1.0 sec 7.73 MBytes 7.73 MBytes/sec
[148] 1.0- 2.0 sec 7.59 MBytes 7.59 MBytes/sec
[148] 2.0- 3.0 sec 7.52 MBytes 7.52 MBytes/sec
[148] 3.0- 4.0 sec 7.59 MBytes 7.59 MBytes/sec
[148] 4.0- 5.0 sec 7.59 MBytes 7.59 MBytes/sec
[148] 5.0- 6.0 sec 7.31 MBytes 7.31 MBytes/sec
[148] 6.0- 7.0 sec 7.66 MBytes 7.66 MBytes/sec
[148] 7.0- 8.0 sec 7.59 MBytes 7.59 MBytes/sec
[148] 8.0- 9.0 sec 7.52 MBytes 7.52 MBytes/sec
[148] 9.0-10.0 sec 7.59 MBytes 7.59 MBytes/sec

That test was ran through the network switch,

as for connecting it directly to the FreeNAS machine i'll have to do that later, I am trying to get file that I need from the server and can't stop the transfer,

Thanks
Nathan

 

[L.E.D]

Well the file transfer started to fail so I canceled it, and here are the results going directly from my PC to the FreeNAS machine,

bin/iperf.exe -c 192.168.1.118 -P 1 -i 1 -p 5001 -f M -t 10
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.118, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 0.06 MByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[148] local 192.168.1.6 port 51091 connected with 192.168.1.118 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[148] 0.0- 1.0 sec 0.77 MBytes 0.77 MBytes/sec
[148] 1.0- 2.0 sec 0.70 MBytes 0.70 MBytes/sec
[148] 2.0- 3.0 sec 2.18 MBytes 2.18 MBytes/sec
[148] 3.0- 4.0 sec 0.49 MBytes 0.49 MBytes/sec
[148] 4.0- 5.0 sec 3.38 MBytes 3.38 MBytes/sec
[148] 5.0- 6.0 sec 2.32 MBytes 2.32 MBytes/sec
[148] 6.0- 7.0 sec 0.56 MBytes 0.56 MBytes/sec
[148] 7.0- 8.0 sec 1.27 MBytes 1.27 MBytes/sec
[148] 8.0- 9.0 sec 2.67 MBytes 2.67 MBytes/sec
[148] 9.0-10.0 sec 4.15 MBytes 4.15 MBytes/sec

Thanks
Nathan

 

[L.E.D]

I had another switch here so I decided to try that, it was running about 1.5MB/s - 2MB/s which was an improvement but it as now dropped and is sitting a 0 bytes/s ...
I switch cables numerous times...
I just don't know,

 

[gpsguy]

Did you try one of your other computers, with the original configuration.

Just trying to rule out something odd with NIC that took a dump. Perhaps that NIC is behaving worse than you think.

 

[L.E.D]

Well with the current setup through the second switch that is, I used another computer in my house and it has XP on it so I couldn't get the transfer speed, It isn't my computer so I couldn't install something like Networx but I could tell anyway that it was faster then my computer, I only let ran for I would say less then a minute and I canceled it and the file was 280MBs so I could tell that yeah it was faster, so I guess my NIC is way worse then I thought it was....

 

[cyberjock]

On my systems, a 280MB file would take less than 4 seconds...

 

[L.E.D]

This was only on 10/100, I would assume that you have some sort of insane setup because that is about 70MB/s, it would be nice to have that but when you don't have money you see the difference between need and want...

 

[titan_rw]

If you call gigabit insane, then I guess so.

Being that you can get gigabit switches for $30 or so, I would consider it affordable.

I can sustain 110MB/sec to my freenas machine. Gigabit isn't that insane really.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah. The amazing thing is that 100Mbps was insanely expensive in ~1995 (16 ports at something like $10K for a Synoptics 28115), and gigabit was similarly priced in ~2000, but it has taken 14 more years for 10G gear to reach similar prices.

The crazy thing is that you can buy a pretty decent "web-managed" 1GbE switch relatively cheap, 8 ports for $100 etc. (Warning: not an endorsement, obDisclosure: we're a Netgear reseller ... product just picked as it is representative and I've laid hands on it).

But you can get cheap gigabit switches for the cost of dinner and a movie. Just waiting for the 10G prices to fall. ;-)

 

[L.E.D]

Well as said, when your money is low, you tend to think... ohwell, enough of that topic,

So from what was shown and read I will need a new network card ? When my computer did run fine the max speeds I would see out of were 45MB/s on gigabit so I don't know if it was just the system the is running FreeNAS or what...

For the switch it is a decent switch, My dad got it in a deal a while back, 24port gigabit, network managed, ProCurve 1800-24G good switch if only my other stuff would run fine,

 

[jgreco]

Well, it looked like your iperf numbers tanked when you started to have problems, so I have to draw the conclusion that your network card

my PC's network card has took a crap and only operates in 10/100 now,

has probably taken more of a crap than just that.

 

[L.E.D]

Thanks for the help, the NIC did run fine on 10/100 before so I guess this is the way the computer wants to tell me that it is slowly dying, which would make sense this system was made in 2005 (Dell Precision 670) and it has had a LOT of use from me, not to mention it came out of General Dynamics so it has had a fair amount of use,

Oh well,

Thanks again,

Nathan