Freenas 8.02 - network pausing for a few seconds on file transfers

[fisheater]

You are not alone, I am following this thread with interest. My upload speed is ~35MB/s with multiple pauses. If any tuning helps, I will post it here.

FE.

 

[jfr2006]

Look at my case, even with 2TB HD, i still get pauses, although they are not so frequent on volume2, they are on volume1 (this volume has only 160GB free). I was thinking if increasing the memory to 16GB will help...

Regards.

 

[Visseroth]

I am interested in this thread as well. I had performance issues prior to the upgrade to 8.0.2RL and my performance seems pretty good now but I'm also seeing little drop outs in the transfer though mine are so short I don't really notice them unless I look at my network graph.
I'm seeing read of about 85-110MB/s and write speeds of about 80-100MB/s.
My read speeds are pretty steady and the write speeds seem to have drop outs for a second or so here and there in the graph.
My hardware specs are overkill but here they are none the less
Dual Intel Xeon 1.6Ghz Quad core CPUs
8GB of DDR2 667Mhz FB-DIMMs
SuperMicro X7DBM Server motherboard
SuperMicro SATA2-MV8 6 port expansion card (PCI-64)
12 Samsung 2TB F4's 5400RPM
800W Redundant power supply
The motherboard has dual Intel 1000 NICs which are teamed which may be the reason I'm not seeing as much delay as you guys are.
None the less if you guys need help and would like me to run some tests just let me know.
I have just done some transfers of about 7GB to and from my server and watched my graphs and I think we all would like more steady and fast flows of data.
My data pool is RAIDz v1 with a hotswap spare. Current capacity is 18TB, 26% utilized.

 

[5teve]

Well i wish I could help others but this whole Linux thing is a new world too me! Pretty impressed with freenas so far tho.

Doing some backup tests I have the following results (all feature spiky transfers from 25% to 95% of network speed)

All backups done using acronis true image 2012 ( a whole nother story!) No compression for backups

Music backup - 156gb backup - 25 minutes all mp3 files

Variety of documents mainly small files plus some large vid files - 196gb - 48 minutes

the mp3 one surprised me as they are fairly small. Transfer speeds seem pretty good but would be even better if sustained!

Thanks

Steve

 

[Digidoc]

After doing some tuning of CIFS, mine has been remarkably stable and fast. I ended up setting the buffer sizes for AIO (read and write) to 10240. Unfortunately I can't share a screen shot or more details of what I did right now though. I unexpectedly had to have my gall bladder removed over the weekend and I'm still recovering from it all. As soon as I can though I'll share all the details of what I did.

 

[frank3523]

If you have 4 x maxtors at 250gb i would be guessing they are around 5-6 years old? they will be SATA1 and probably quite slow by todays standard. try modifying your loader and sysctl (at your own risk!) to see if you can smooth it out.

also have a look for a way of getting the nas box to write to itself (im a linux newbie) as then that will take your network out of the equation.[/QUOTE]

Yes the disk are about 5 years old but with the older freenas server i never had any problems. My older nas server was also freenas but version 7.

 

[frank3523]

It was not a good idea to change the vmkmem parameters in loader.conf.
The nas server didn't boot anymore. I had to recreate my usb stick and after that it booted up again.

 

[5teve]

Wow... sorry to hear that frank.. strange how similarly configured machines behave so differently isnt it? still at least you have nice fresh config!

Digidoc... sorry to hear about your health... hope your better soon... i'd love to know, when you can, how you went about changing your read write buffers for cifs.

Thanks

Steve

 

[frank3523]

http://icesquare.com/wordpress/how-to-improve-zfs-performance/

Used this link that helped a little now my copy jobs don't fail anymore.
I still have the pauses in between.

 

[Digidoc]

Thanks 5teve. I'm actually doing pretty good right now. I got out of the hospital on Sunday, but my mother and father pretty much kidnapped me and are making me stay at their place until I recover. :D LMAO! Hey, although I'm going stir-crazy from the lack of things to do, I can't complain too loudly though. :D

If you open up the options page for CIFS (click the wrench icon in the services page, right besides the switch to turn CIFS on and off), you can change some options for CIFS. Scroll down to the bottom of the options and you'll see an option to turn on AIO mode (asynchronous I/O). Turn it on. just below that you'll see two fields for the read and write buffers for AIO. I tested it by copying a large 20GB folder back and fourth between one of my desktops and my FreeNAS server. I found that for my system, 10,240 was the sweet spot.

There was some other options I enabled in the Aux parameters, but i can't remember what it was off-hand. To be honest, the biggest difference I saw was with increasing the read/write buffers.

Wow... sorry to hear that frank.. strange how similarly configured machines behave so differently isnt it? still at least you have nice fresh config!

Digidoc... sorry to hear about your health... hope your better soon... i'd love to know, when you can, how you went about changing your read write buffers for cifs.

Thanks

Steve

 

[frank3523]

I think i have found the cifs setting

its under cifs services and then config.
I already changed the value but for me not any improvement.:(

 

[Digidoc]

What do you have for hardware in your FreeNAS system (and what do you have for networking gear too)?

For example: My FreeNAS box has a Phenom-II X6 1090T CPU, 16GB RAM, seven 2TB WD Green HDD's, an IBM ServeRAID M1015 (crossflashed with IT firmware), an Intel EXPI9400PT server NIC, and an MSI NF890 motherboard. My network isn't anything to write home about really, but I've got basic Netgear five port gigabit switches (and it doesn't support jumbo frames).

I have my network arranged in such a way that my Netgear WNDR3700 gigabit wireless router isn't the central connection point (it's attached off of one of the gigabit switches). I did that to minimize the number of switches the data has to go through, and keeps most of the data off of the WNDR's built in gigabit switch (which although is good, isn't as good as a dedicated switch).

 

[5teve]

Thanks 5teve. I'm actually doing pretty good right now. I got out of the hospital on Sunday, but my mother and father pretty much kidnapped me and are making me stay at their place until I recover. :D LMAO! Hey, although I'm going stir-crazy from the lack of things to do, I can't complain too loudly though. :D

If you open up the options page for CIFS (click the wrench icon in the services page, right besides the switch to turn CIFS on and off), you can change some options for CIFS. Scroll down to the bottom of the options and you'll see an option to turn on AIO mode (asynchronous I/O). Turn it on. just below that you'll see two fields for the read and write buffers for AIO. I tested it by copying a large 20GB folder back and fourth between one of my desktops and my FreeNAS server. I found that for my system, 10,240 was the sweet spot.

There was some other options I enabled in the Aux parameters, but i can't remember what it was off-hand. To be honest, the biggest difference I saw was with increasing the read/write buffers.

Glad to hear your doing good. Thanks for the info.

From what I understood that setting is the minimum size file in bytes that aio will be enabled. So in your case any file smaller than 10240 won't have aio enabled for its read write. I think there is a cli for buffer size tho.

Hopefully I'm wrong!

Thanks

Steve

 

[frank3523]

What do you have for hardware in your FreeNAS system (and what do you have for networking gear too)?

My Mobo is an Asus E35M1 disks are 4 x 250GB maxtor disks 5400rpm and I have 8GB of memory installed. My netwerk consist of a linksys e4200 and an 8 port netgear gigabit switch. I also don't have jumbo's enabled.

 

[Digidoc]

You're using the integrated LAN on the board I assume, correct? If that's the case, it's using a Realtek 8111E chip. Would you be able to install an Intel NIC on the board for testing purposes? From what I've read (and from my own experiences with integrated Realtek NIC's), Realtek NICs tend to have "issues". There may be a way around it by setting options for the NIC (i.e.: hard setting the link speed, etc), but the easiest way to determine if it's related to the issue at hand is to hook up another NIC (preferably an Intel one).

My Mobo is an Asus E35M1 disks are 4 x 250GB maxtor disks 5400rpm and I have 8GB of memory installed. My netwerk consist of a linksys e4200 and an 8 port netgear gigabit switch. I also don't have jumbo's enabled.

 

[frank3523]

Oke I will give that a try.
Let you know the result

 

[frank3523]

I solved my pausing write issue. Changed the disks with 4 times a seagate barracuda 1TB ES.2 drive. My freenas server rocks now with speeds up to 100Mb/s. So it looks like slow disks and ZFS can really be a problem.

 

[Visseroth]

Good to know. I wouldn't think that my 12 drives at 5400 RPM would really slow down my write speeds any with a 1Gb stream.