Very slow transfer speed but ifconfig says 1000baseT <full-duplex>

[josh baker]

hello! i have been using a dell dimension 3100 as a nas for a couple of months now. Because of lack of performance I decided to buy some new hardware, H81M-HDS motherboard with GLAN a gigabit switch and 10GB of ram etc.

after installing freenas 9.2.0 i noticed that there were no performance increases at all...

I get a transfer speed of about 70MB/second for about a second but the it just keeps falling to about 7.00MB/second. (I am using CAT6 cabbles.) when booting the nas up I have a red light on the NIC indicating a gigabit connection but when the system is up and running it turns green??? I typed in ifconfig to the shell and that says:

re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=8209b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_MAGI
C,LINKSTATE>
ether d0:50:99:14:69:5b
inet 192.168.1.66 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
inet6 fe80::d250:99ff:fe14:695b%re0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
ipfw0: flags=8801<UP,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 65536
nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
options=600003<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

if someone could help me out that would be great :)

 

[Yatti420]

Need more system specs / network setup.. I would say a network problem if both boxes could start at 70 and fall.. How big is your pool?

I just looked up the mobo specs.. Why did you purchase this? It has nothing recommended ;)..

With 10GB of ram and a max of 16 in combination with a realtek lan.. You probably wont get great speeds..

 

[josh baker]

Thank you for the fast reply system specs: Asrock H81M-HDS, intel pentium g3220, 10GB of Kingston ram, a seagat 2TB HDD and a cx430 psu.

network set up: I have the nas, my computer and a bt home hub 3 on a TP-Link TL-SG1008D gigabit switch.

the dell has never hit 70 it maxes at 12MB/second only the new machine hits 70 for like a second

the reason i got that motherboard is because i got it for about £25 from work, Im not sure what you mean by pool :)

 

[Yatti420]

So the dell is 10/100 and the new board is running at 10/100/1000.. I would probably first try more ram.. The hardware choice can be a biter for FreeNAS.. You don't have ECC ram so hmmm...

 

[gpsguy]

Pool: a collection of devices that provides physical storage and data replication managed by ZFS.

So, you just have 1 - 2Tb drive? As Yatti420 said your Realtek NIC could be a contributing factor. We recommend Intel NIC's, an OEM Intel Pro/1000 costs about $30 USD. Another issue could be your "power saving" gigabit switch.

What protocol are you using to transfer the data? CIFS? Are you copying a large directory of small files. If so, you might see it start off fast and then see performance taper off. Try copying a big file, like a big (several Gb) ISO.

Given the performance on the Dell, my guess is that it didn't have a gigabit ethernet adapter and/or you weren't connected to a gigabit switch.

 

[josh baker]

yes i just have a 2tb hard drive in the new machine, i have cifs and afp configured just using my pc atm, about an hour ago i tried to copy a 42gb file over and it said it would take 9 hours or so. I left it iv just came back and it has copied already not sure whats happened there?

 

[josh baker]

I have a spare Startech st1000spex network card, would this be btter to use/ is it compatible

 

[Yatti420]

Ram.. depends client pcs hardware also can be slow etc

Sent from my SGH-I257M using Tapatalk 2

 

[josh baker]

i thought 10gb of ram was a lot for a nas?

 

[Yatti420]

Hmm 100gb of ram probably isn't even alot for ZFS.. Is it a miniITX board or something? Since you can't run ECC I would probably consider a switch to the X9 board that I have or maybe x10 or something for future proofing..

Oh and are you running powerd on FreeNAS?

 

[josh baker]

WOW i thought you need a 1GB of ram per TB

 

[Yatti420]

Make sure powerd (Freenas gui) and any green features (mobo bios) are disabled to ensure optimal speeds aswell..

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations#RAM

 

[josh baker]

ok i will have a look

 

[gpsguy]

It depends on the OS. FreeNAS loves RAM. For ZFS, 8 Gb is the minimum, regardless of how much storage you have. With just a single 2Tb drive, I don't think you need any additional RAM for now.

Yes, you should have purchased a board & CPU that use ECC RAM. Search the forum for threads on ECC RAM and why you should use it.

i thought 10gb of ram was a lot for a nas?

Your Realtek is probably better than a Startech. As I said, even an inexpensive Intel will probably provide some improvement.

I have a spare Startech st1000spex network card, would this be btter to use/ is it compatible

You need to focus on your performance/benchmark tests.

Note, don't use AFP & CIFS to access the same files. You can end up corrupting them. I've read that Mac's can use CIFS - it might be best to just use it.

 

[joeschmuck]

First thing, the RealTek is fine because you have a very reasonable CPU if you reused the G3220. You also have more than enough RAM so that isn't your issue either.

I would focus on a few things... You said that the ethernet card appears to switch from 1Gb to 100Mb mode during the transfer? A green light on your MB indicates 1Gb/sec connection (read your manual). Green is what you want.

So far based on what I've read this tells me you have a network issue, not FreeNAS issue. Replace your Ethernet cables. You should connect your FreeNAS machine directly to your PC. Try to transfer data over CIFS and you don't need a huge file, anything over 200MB should be good to get a reading on transfer speed. If you do obtain a fast transfer then start suspecting your network switch of other ethernet cabling. If you fail to get a good transfer speed then replace the ethernet cable and try again. If that fails again then it's either your FreeNAS or the destination computer.

Report all your transfer speed rates.

Another thing, what happens when you transfer a file in the opposite direction?

You have not mentioned anything about how your system is configured, meaning your pool. A poor design here could lead to issues as well, but down to 7Mb/sec is probably not the reason. Oh, how full is your pool?

And lastly, it is too bad you upgraded to a MB that doesn't support ECC RAM. This could be a fatal flaw on your part but has no issue with today's network performance issue.

 

[josh baker]

thank you joeschmuck,

I believe i know what the issue is know after doing a few test, when i connect a cat6 cable to the nas the light is green, when i connect a cat5e cable to the nas the light turns red...

i have wired the nas up with cat6 cable however my pc only has cat5e cable and the light is red, im guessing my bottle neck is the cat5e cable?

 

[josh baker]

thanks for all the the help guys i have it sorted now :) using only cat6 cables here are my results

 

[cyberjock]

I disagree with joeschmuck on the Realtek not being the problem. Realteks may perform well with a sufficiently powerful CPU(which you have). But that's no indicator of the reliability of Realteks on FreeBSD/FreeNAS. There's plenty of examples of people that have weird problems that suddenly go away with Intel. Unfortunately the only way to validate that the Realtek is the problem is to use an Intel and see if the problem continues.

I'm not saying that the Realtek *is* the problem, just that you can't really rule it out. We've had people that never get Realteks to work despite the green light and everything. We've had others that have seen it work fine but every so often it suddenly drops out. Others had a NIC that worked fine for a while, and then one FreeNAS update made the controller no longer work. Still others have used them without any problems ever. The problem is that the last group is very much the minority and since an Intel NIC is $25 the question can be asked "why not just use the good stuff and ensure you don't have to spend time and headaches on it?"

 

[joeschmuck]

thank you joeschmuck,

I believe i know what the issue is know after doing a few test, when i connect a cat6 cable to the nas the light is green, when i connect a cat5e cable to the nas the light turns red...

i have wired the nas up with cat6 cable however my pc only has cat5e cable and the light is red, im guessing my bottle neck is the cat5e cable?

I would have expected a bad cable but I wouldn't expected it to be simply because it was a Cat5E cable, maybe a poor connection, assuming it was a properly wired Cat5E cable. Of course if you have rather long runs then the Cat 6 cable is better due to the number of twists per inch in the conductors. Glad you got it fixed. Curious what your speed is for a 200MB (or more) file on it's first transfer. I say first transfer because any successive transfer could and will likely have some or all of the data cached which would give a false speed. The 188MB/sec speed you got above is about 90MB/sec too fast.

And as you know, Cyberjock is a heavy promoter of Intel NICs and I can't blame him, they do work good, and he doesn't care for RealTek at all which is okay too. I assessed your problem differently as I didn't feel RealTek was your issue, at least not until other tests were performed to rule out other possible failures. I don't like telling someone their hardware is broken or suspect unless I have more information to support it.

 

[mattlach]

Second what has been said here before.

Realtek lan chips perform miserably. Intel or broadcom Netxtreme should perform better.

Check if networking is actually th eproblem by using iperf.

iperf comes preinstalled on FreeNAS. From the console type "iperf -s" to set it up as a listening server. Then download either iperf or jperf (if you prefer gui) and run iperf -c <ip to your freenas box> and it will tell you what kind of transfer speeds you are getting between the two.

Just because you have a good link speed doesn't mean that you will ahve a good transfer speed. Everything from poor cables, to bad switches in between can sabotage the speed.

If iperf tells you you are getting a good transfer speed then look elsewhere (maybe CPU/RAM?) but if iperf is lower than desired seriously consider getting an Intel Pro/1000 NIC (these are relatively cheap and very good for FreeNAS) and install it in one of your free expansion slots.