Will link aggregation solve my problem?

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ToBeFrank

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I have a freenas mini box that is the storage system for all of my media. I have another server that runs nzbdrone and nzbget to download media and store it to the freenas box. I have clients on my network that are watching the media from an nfs share that the freenas box is sharing.

The problem is when the nzb server is moving a file to the freenas box, it saturates the gige port on the freenas box, which causes the clients that are watching media to stutter. Do I understand it correctly that link aggregation will mean the nzb server can saturate one gige port while allowing the media clients to grab data over the other gige port? My switch supports LACP so it should be fairly simple to set up?
 

cyberjock

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Probably not. Unless you have more than about 10 simultaneous client using the server in a measurable way, it's not worth it.

You do not get the kind of load balancing that you think you will with LACP.

Link aggregation is effectively worthless for home users. Even I tried it back in 2008 on Windows only to learn the hard lessons. Despite the fact that I was moving 50GB+ of data every day between servers, the benefits were literally non-existent. It cost me almost $1000 in hardware at that time to figure it out.

Nothing has changed, LACP still is useless for 99.9% of home users. Unless your home is a mansion with desktop that are constantly used in all 15 bedrooms, it's useless.
 

SmallGuy

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You are better with:
-limiting the bandwidth of your nzb server
And/or
-scheduling the transfer when you don't need network availability.
 

Tywin

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You could set up a dedicated point-to-point link between the server and your FreeNAS that lives on a separate subnet. Those downloads will saturate that GigE link, but your other link will remain free for clients (assuming the FreeNAS box can handle the workload).
 

ToBeFrank

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Thanks. I pretty much knew the answer already, but just wanted to verify. I thought about creating a subnet for it, but that would require adding another NIC to the server. I also played around with traffic shaping, but that seems like overkill and it caused its own issues. I ended up moving nzbget to a jail on my freenas box. This avoids the copy from the server to the freenas. It mostly solved the problem, but there is still a small stutter on the clients. I'll have to investigate to see what is causing this as it doesn't seem like there should be any bottlenecks left.
 

9C1 Newbee

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Not sure if you are using XBMC or not. If you are, you can configure a buffer on the XBMC machine.
 

ToBeFrank

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Not sure if you are using XBMC or not. If you are, you can configure a buffer on the XBMC machine.

I am, and I have a buffer configured. However, the stutter happens when watching live tv. There's not much of a buffer to work with there.
 

9C1 Newbee

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Live TV doesn't come from your server, does it?
 

9C1 Newbee

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Ahhhh. I see what you are doing now. I had never understood what Mythtv did. I was thinking you were streaming from the internet or something.

Ok, I got nothing.
 
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depasseg

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As is mentioned above. Aggregation is not the way to go. However, you could create a separate storage network using different NIC's and subnet's to connect the FreeNAS with your other server. If there are only 2 machines involved, you could use a direct ethernet cable (no switch necessary). Just manually configure the IP addresses.
 
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