not reaching gigabit network speed

[martijnv]

Hi Everybody,

I did a lot of searching on Google and reading the posts in the Freenas forum, but i couldn't find the answer to my problem.

I have a wired gigabit network with a linksys WRT320N router and cat6 cables connecting the different computers. The freenas server runs on the 8.3.1 64 bit release (latest version) and has the following hardware:
- CPU: Intel Pentium G2020 Boxed
- Mobo: ASRock B75 Pro3-M
- Memory: 16 GB Corsair CMV16GX3M2A1333C9
- NIC: intel Pro/1000GT Gigabit Network Card
- hdd: 3 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST1500DM003 hard disks

For the test I have setup a ufs volume with 1 disk, so that i could see the maximum transfer performance of my system. For file transfer i have created a CIFS share.

The max transfer speed i got when testing with jperf was 40.5 MBytes and that is a lot lesss than i expected to achieve.

I ran the following test to identify the problems:

ifconfig shows the following output:
Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)

iperf -sD (with jperf TCP cllient)
Client connecting to 192.168.1.119, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 0.01 MByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[216] local 192.168.1.112 port 58042 connected with 192.168.1.119 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[216] 0.0- 1.0 sec 40.2 MBytes 337 Mbits/sec
I ran the jperf test from several computers (not at the same time) and this was the best result.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/nieuw/temp bs=2048k count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
2097152000 bytes transferred in 16.248405 secs (129068176 bytes/sec)


I hope someone can point me in the right direction of finding a solution.

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Martijn

 

[Kosta]

This is about the same rig I would build, just the other motherboard, Supermicro X9SCL. However, the CPU would be the same. 40 MB/s is very low. Sorry, I have no solution, but will be watching.

Another thing: can you say what your power usage is, via kill-a-watt, when HDDs hibernate?

 

[jgreco]

Looks like your wired gigabit network is not all it could be.

First, try moving to the Realtek ethernet onboard the ASRock. The Pro/1000GT's a great card, but PCI is an old interface and who knows, maybe the ASRock doesn't support it too well.

If that doesn't affect things, then try connecting one of your client PC's directly to the FreeNAS and eliminating the Linksys. When that fixes things for you, let us know.

 

[martijnv]

Thanks guys,

I solved my problem. It turned out to be twofold. first i found out that my cable was damaged somehow and was not transmitting at full gigabit speed. After replacing the cable i was able to achieve network speeds of 85 MBytes per second. After enabling the realtek ethernet onboard card (as suggested by jgreco) i am able to achieve network speeds of 113 MBytes per second.

So thanks for helping me out!

Regards,

Martijn