HP Proliant N40L Microserver - CIFS Performance

[squareguy]

OS=FreeNAS 8.3.0 p1

I just wanted to comment on a little file server I tossed together and what I noticed with CIFS (Samba).

Hardware:
HP Proliant N40L Microserver
16GB DDR3 ECC RAM
Intel EXPI9301CT NIC
LSI 9211-4i HBA
3 WD Red 2TB SATA Drives (ZFS Mirror X 3)
APC BE450G UPS


UPS works flawlessly set set to initiate shutdown after 60 seconds, verified sane shutdown.
System runs wonderfully in general.

The biggest issue I had was slow CIFS file transfers during testing and i read through a lot of others having similar issues. Long story short. I was getting 50-60MB/s writes, stalls, etc. I used autotune, played with AIO, nothing seemed to make it better. I finally remembered on my desktop.......... Kaspersky Internet Security. DOH! I turned off Kaspersky and immediately my writes hit 102MB/s before averaging 80+MB/s for a 50GB file. Small files seemed fine too. This is just very rudimentary testing but you get the idea. I read elsewhere that the CPU in this server couldn't push more than 50MB/s and I just didn't believe that. So, remember to look at your desktop as well and not make a silly mistake as did I.

Nice little server BTW.

Squareguy

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, I have Symantec Endpoint Protection latest version and I've seen the same thing. The problem is that today's firewall is more than just a dummy firewall of years gone by. It does packet inspections and those can be pretty CPU intensive on your average desktop. Pretty crappy but I haven't seen an easy way to permanently disable packet inspection on Symantec or Kaspersky despite there being ALOT of complaints of this behavior of you do some Googling. With my old Windows Server and SEP installed I couldn't get above 30MB/sec no matter what. Disabled SEP on the server and instant 90MB/sec. But who in their right mind actually disables firewalls on a Windows machine! That's why I'm glad to have FreeNAS.