Windows7ge
Contributor
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2017
- Messages
- 124
Up until now I have been using SMB on FreeNAS and as many people have told me my 8 drive RAIDz2 (7200RPM disks) wasn't quite as fast as it should be as a network share (~500MB/s).
Well, I decided to build a 12x1TB SSD RAIDz2 and found that I had near identical performance using SMB.
Talking to people I was told that SMB/CIFS is heavily single threaded and not optimized on FreeNAS or Linux in general.
Someone found a guide that would optimize SMB a little bit and we increased the performance by ~100MB/s but that isn't nearly enough for a full SSD array with a 20Gbit network link and significantly higher internal performance. However, this at least told us that the bottleneck was SMB itself. For this reason we (as in me and the people currently helping me) are trying to explore with other file sharing protocols such as NFS & iSCSI however my efforts to set these up failed. I have no experience with either.
NFS - It had appeared to be pretty strait forward but disabling SMB and enabling NFS made the server completely drop off the network (excluding the WebUI that still worked). I could not locate the server let alone the NFS share. It was explained to me that by default Windows will use both TCP & UDP while NFS will only use TCP. I tried to disable UDP but couldn't locate a setting on the Windows NIC. FreeNAS had a NFS configuration option to enable UDP for clients that need it (ie. Windows) however this still did not make the server show up on the network.
iSCSI - Exploring this was a complete failure. From my current perspective it is quite intimidating with several pages that need to be configured and even then I couldn't figure out how to connect to it. I have been told though that this very well could be the most performance promising solution.
If you need system specifications let me know. I don't really see them necessary to list at this time.
Well, I decided to build a 12x1TB SSD RAIDz2 and found that I had near identical performance using SMB.
Talking to people I was told that SMB/CIFS is heavily single threaded and not optimized on FreeNAS or Linux in general.
Someone found a guide that would optimize SMB a little bit and we increased the performance by ~100MB/s but that isn't nearly enough for a full SSD array with a 20Gbit network link and significantly higher internal performance. However, this at least told us that the bottleneck was SMB itself. For this reason we (as in me and the people currently helping me) are trying to explore with other file sharing protocols such as NFS & iSCSI however my efforts to set these up failed. I have no experience with either.
NFS - It had appeared to be pretty strait forward but disabling SMB and enabling NFS made the server completely drop off the network (excluding the WebUI that still worked). I could not locate the server let alone the NFS share. It was explained to me that by default Windows will use both TCP & UDP while NFS will only use TCP. I tried to disable UDP but couldn't locate a setting on the Windows NIC. FreeNAS had a NFS configuration option to enable UDP for clients that need it (ie. Windows) however this still did not make the server show up on the network.
iSCSI - Exploring this was a complete failure. From my current perspective it is quite intimidating with several pages that need to be configured and even then I couldn't figure out how to connect to it. I have been told though that this very well could be the most performance promising solution.
If you need system specifications let me know. I don't really see them necessary to list at this time.
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