link aggregation. one interface not optimized

[martin laf]

Thanks for reading;

Switch is link sys sr224;
router is netgear wgr614;

system: FreeNAS-8.0.2-RELEASE-i386 (8288)

have done link aggregation since the comp has two network card;

In reporting have interface: re0 & rlo and lagg0. re0 is showing hardly any activity while rl0 is showing much activity. Aggreegation has been done as "load sharing". from both network card a cable is connected to the switch.

people in our office complain of slow server/ access to file.

New to this but somehow managing to get the basic running. Now wondering is something has not been done right in order to accelerate the speed of file access. We are an archietct office where our files are all shared on this freenas.

Thanks

Martin

 

[peterh]

i would start with removing the link aggregation and see what usage
it will be with one NIC. Which nic is a matter of taste, and then "baseline"
the systems to figure out what performance you actually have. Nice
would be a reproducible load ( something you can do from time to
time and clock it's performance) This is the starting point, any changes you
do should be compared to this .

Then figure out what bottlenecks you have during actual use. Systat -vm or systat -io
will show disc activity, systat -ifs will show network activity.
See how much memory you can add ( more is better).

Then figure out if you zfs pools are made with more then one vdev ( yes you need that
if you want more then mediocre performance)

 

[mav@]

re0 is showing hardly any activity while rl0 is showing much activity.

To maintain packet ordering LAGG transfers data from one client/stream via only one NIC. To use bandwidth of both NICs you need several simultaneous clients/streams. Different switches implement different level of packet inspection to detect streams. More simple one may look only on packet MAC addresses, but not on IPs or TCP ports. In that case to utilize both NICs you will need several clients.