Poor network performance

[Tadd]

My setup is as follows:

Dell Poweredge 4600, Dual xeon 2.4 Ghz (dual core per processor i believe), 4 Gig ECC Registered Ram (i know below recomended amount but I do not believe this is my bottle neck), PERC 3/Di RAID controller in SCSI mode, 3x300 gig SCSI drives, ZFS, no DeDup, no encryption, no prefetching. RAID Z1. Okay so when I write files to my freenas box from my windows pc using cifs, i get between 40 and 50 Mb/s. This is acceptable for the moment. This writing process seems to use 80 to 100% of the PE 4600's cpu (seems unusual). Writing from my freenas box to a windows box starts out at 124Mb/s then very quickly drops to the low 20's. PE 4600 has gigabit ethernet, gigabit router, gigabit windows box. Whats going on with the network speed? Secondly, is FreeNAS even recognizing tho other CPU?

 

[Akhademik]

I'm new here too. I definitely can't help you with your question and i would love to hear some words from a guru too. BTW i wanna ask, to maximize the transfer rate do i have to have 1 gigabit for the NAS, 1 gigabit for the PC (the one i use to up and down data to the NAS), 1 gigabit router or switch? Cause at the moment i used default network card comes along with mobo, 1 regular switch and realtek lan for the PC and the transfer speed around 11MB/s, that normal right?

 

[Whattteva]

To get full Gigabit speeds (~119 MB/s), all of your components need to support it. That means you need a Gigabit card on the NAS, Gigabit card on the PC, and Gigabit router/switch.
11 MB/s transfer speed seems to indicate that one of your components is only FastEthernet (100 Mbit) and hence, does not support Gigabit.

As for the OP, it looks like your bottleneck is the CPU. I believe CIFS is mostly single-threaded and heavily dependent on CPU speed.

 

[Akhademik]

To get full Gigabit speeds (~119 MB/s), all of your components need to support it. That means you need a Gigabit card on the NAS, Gigabit card on the PC, and Gigabit router/switch.
11 MB/s transfer speed seems to indicate that one of your components is only FastEthernet (100 Mbit) and hence, does not support Gigabit.

As for the OP, it looks like your bottleneck is the CPU. I believe CIFS is mostly single-threaded and heavily dependent on CPU speed.

Really helpful thank you. Now i know i have save some money for all the gigabit things. Could you please suggest gigabit card for PC and NAs and also some gigabit swith for homeuser? I'm really appreciate that.

 

[Whattteva]

This card suggested by jgreco works well and is fairly affordable.
As far as routers, I guess it would depend if you just want a switch or a multi-purpose wireless router/switch.
I personally use ASUS RT-N16. It's a solid router supporting Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11N wireless, 2 USB ports, and above all, a big enough ROM that can be flashed with Tomato firmware opening up a whole slew of other functionalities like SSH, OpenVPN, Transmission BT, QoS, etc...
The OpenVPN feature alone, in my opinion, is more than a compelling enough reason to buy this router. It's always good to separate that function from your actual NAS box. Also, by setting it up on the router, you get rid of the headache associated with having to set up extra routing like you would have to do if you set up OpenVPN on another machine other than the default gateway.

If you want something more future-proof, there's also an upgraded version of that router that supports 802.11AC with dual band (ASUS RT-AC66U).