SOLVED [NFS/FTP] Slow Read Performance

[naro]

Hi guys,

so I think my read performance off my NFS shares is pretty bad. I'll start this with

First off my system, so that you guys know what you are dealing with:
CPU: Intel Core i3-4160, 2x 3.60GHz, boxed (BX80646I34160)
RAM: 2x Samsung DIMM 8GB, DDR3L-1600, CL11, ECC (M391B1G73QH0-YK0)
Mainboard: Supermicro X10SLL-F retail (MBD-X10SLL-F-O)
Storage: 5x Western Digital WD Red 4TB, 3.5", SATA 6Gb/s (WD40EFRX) as RaidZ2
OS: FreeNAS 9.3 on a Verbatim Store 'n' Go V3 Max 16GB, USB 3.0 (49805) (plugged into USB2)
(if you need the rest like case, fans, psu and so on, just ask!)

I headed to the storage subforums in here and read about the dd tests, following result:

[root@freenas] /mnt/mydata/Inbox# dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp.dat bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 21.299636 secs (5041127546 bytes/sec)
[root@freenas] /mnt/mydata/Inbox# dd if=tmp.dat of=/dev/null bs=2048k count=50k
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
107374182400 bytes transferred in 11.048935 secs (9718057262 bytes/sec)
​

Also a move "on" the system looked very good to me:

[root@freenas] /mnt/mydata/Inbox# rsync --info=progress2 tmp.dat /mnt/mydata/Weiteres/
107,374,182,400 100% 500.30MB/s 0:03:24 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1)
​

This is all looking pretty good from my point of view (please correct me if I am wrong here!)

Also, when I copy files onto the freenas system, I'm getting somewhere around 100 MiB/s most of the time (though the speed goes up and down between 40 MiB/s and 100 MiB/s sometimes). Besides the drops still good.

But now the "fun" part:

I don't use windows and have mounted the shares as followed: (snipped from my linux system, fedora 20)

linuxd ~ » cat /etc/fstab
...
192.168.0.107:/mnt/mydata/Inbox /mnt/inbox nfs auto,intr,_netdev,user,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,tcp,defaults 0 0
192.168.0.107:/mnt/mydata/Musik /mnt/musik nfs auto,intr,_netdev,user,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,tcp,defaults 0 0
192.168.0.107:/mnt/mydata/Weiteres /mnt/weiteres nfs auto,intr,_netdev,user,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,tcp,defaults 0 0
...
​

When I try to copy files onto my linux desktop or on the freenas box itself (from one share into another, analog to the rsync test) via NFS (and also ftp and sftp) I get a maximum transfer rate of about 1,1 MiB/s. Even if the files basically do not leave the freenas box. I tried a reboot of both desktop and freenas, but that did not solve the case.

Do you guys have any Ideas what could be a problem? I actually suspect the NFS parameters, but I'm not that experienced in finetuning them. I'm happy to provide logs if you tell me which ones you want!

 

[SweetAndLow]

Probably a bottle neck on the Linux client or you could try changing your wsize and rsize to 1M and see if that improves performance. I don't think that is your big issue though.

 

[naro]

Probably a bottle neck on the Linux client or you could try changing your wsize and rsize to 1M and see if that improves performance. I don't think that is your big issue though.

Thanks four your reply! I just tried avoiding this bottleneck and went with a complete different machine, still linux but a different distro and kernel version though (OpenSUSE 13.2). I mounted the NFS shares with just the "defaults" settings, no further tweaking. The performance when I tried to copy stuff on the NAS was actually even worse, didn't get over 300 KiB/s. I instantly tried another rsync copy via SSH of the same file and destination and got a solid 86 MiB/s out off that.

I just tried out a different file manager just in case this could be the issue as I was using KDE with dolphin on both linux systems. Still no result. Also a rsync from my linux systems (no SSH, using the NFS mounts) yields performance below 1 MiB/s.

I will try next setting up a CIFS share and mounting that using linux. I am not sure if that will offer any differences, as I happened to experience the same issues using FTP / SFTP.

I'm keeping you guys posted in case anyone else has similar issues.

UPDATE:
I tried the CIFS share and got similar transfer speeds, sadly. I could not get the CIFS share working with perfect permissions, but just trying to copy a file from the NAS to my local desktop showed transfer speeds around 1MiB/s. I'm still finding this very odd as the speed using ssh is consistently great.

I'm starting to suspect some network component of mine to be the cause of all that trouble as I am getting pretty consistent maximum speeds of 1,1 MiB/s. I am using an Archer C2 (TP-Link) to connect the different devices. Does anyone have any ideas how I could troubleshoot that without another router?

UPDATE 2:
Okay this is stupid and I feel stupid. I simply rebooted the router out of frustration of not finding any performance options in the web interface. Seems to have solved the issue for the most part, a first test yielded somewhere between 50 and 80 MiB/s performance, which works for me. At least I have learned quite a bit about NFS! :D

I'm setting this to solved.