Poor performance with 2TB/4k HDDs and Raid-Z

[Milhouse]

Interesting machine the microserver...And what about the CIFS tranfers?

With a Windows 7 SP1 PC (Intel i7-870/8GB RAM, Realtek GigE) and CIFS, when reading an 8GB file from the Microserver-based FreeNAS 8.0.2-BETA2 to an Intel X-25M SSD in the PC, the speed averaged 60MB/s-63MB/s, and when writing the same 8GB file from the SSD back to the FreeNAS the speed averaged 65MB/s-70MB/s.

Note that I've installed a cheap £20 Intel Pro-1000 CT NIC and disabled the built-in Broadcom NIC as the latter gave me problems when testing with iperf - the bge driver would hang and reset the NIC, apparently a long standing issue with this driver and BSD so the easiest solution was to go Intel.

Both PC and FreeNAS are connected to a Netgear GigE switch, and Jumbo Frames are not enabled. I could probably get slightly better results if I dumped the Realtek in the PC, as this is now most likely the last remaining "bottleneck" although to be honest I'm happy as it is with the performance.

I did notice a significant performance improvement after I recreated the volume in 8.0.1-BETA2 with forced 4K sectors - it had previously been created in 8.0-RELEASE without 4K sector support (dd performance was about 100MB/s read, 80MB/s write).

 

[nismohks]

i am using seagate St2000DL003 5900rpm drives with Freenas 8.0.4 Release p2 on my microserver with 8gb ECC ram.

i destroyed my pool and recreated using 4k sectors and now my transfer speed is slower than ever before and im only getting 12MB/sec writes compared to 35MB/sec before when using CIFS and windows 7.

in CIFS, ive enabled:

Large RW Support
Send files with sendfile(2)
Enable AIO
Minimum AIO read size 4096
Minimum AIO write size 4096

Any suggestions on tweaking this?

thanks