Poor ZFS RAIDZ performance?

[RamGuy]

I'm faced with some poor ZFS RAIDZ performance on my FreeNAS 8.2 (Release) server.

My hardware:

Asus P8B-E/4L
Intel Xeon E3-1270 @ 3.40GHz
16GB (4x 4GB) 1333MHz, EEC DDR3
Asus GeForce GT 520
IBM M1015 RAID Controller flashed with LSI 9240-8i IT-firmware
7x Western Digital RE4 2TB in ZFS RAIDZ (not RAIDZ2)
1x Intel 520 SSD 60GB for FreeNAS
2x Intel 520 SSD 60GB for ZFS Log


When utilizing Samba (CIFS) to my Windows 7 desktop system I'm faced with anything from a few hundred KB/s to perhaps a maximum of 40MB/s when transferring mostly large files (like 8GB+ M4V etc..) which I find to be quite low considering the hardware and the disks.


When I played around with NAS4Free (which ended up bugging out, which is why I'm back on FreeNAS) on the same hardware running ZFS RAIDZ I was only bottlenecked by the network interface and was seeing about 95-110MB/s writes and for some strange reason 50-80MB/s read. Now with FreeNAS I'm seeing a maximum of 40MB/s writes, and about the same in reads.


Is there some hidden tricks and secrets that might improve my performance?

 

[cyberjock]

Your hardware is plenty sufficient for what you are trying to do. What version of FreeNAS are you running? Also what NIC?

If you do a dd test write/read to your zpool what do you get?

If you are transferring large files you should NOT be using a ZFS log. Those are useful for things such as transactional databases only. For all other purposes they will slow you down. I doubt that would cause the poor performance you are seeing, but as I've never had a use for a ZFS log or experimented with one I'm not sure.

 

[TravisT]

I'm seeing some very similar problems with my build. I'm glad to see that you're using the M1015 boards, as I'm planning to buy a couple soon.

My problems are only with writes - my reads are up at about 70-80MB/s. I've tried a bunch of CIFS settings, none of which seem to have much impact on the problem. I'm trying to roll back to an older version now to see if that makes a difference (8.0.2-RELEASE).

 

[cyberjock]

Why haven't you upgraded to 8.0.4 or 8.2? You do know there's security vulnerabilities in your version? Not to mention bug fixes. You may find that an update will fix your problem. I know 8.2 has a very cool optimizer built in to change some system settings based on your hardware.

 

[RamGuy]

Your hardware is plenty sufficient for what you are trying to do. What version of FreeNAS are you running? Also what NIC?

If you do a dd test write/read to your zpool what do you get?

If you are transferring large files you should NOT be using a ZFS log. Those are useful for things such as transactional databases only. For all other purposes they will slow you down. I doubt that would cause the poor performance you are seeing, but as I've never had a use for a ZFS log or experimented with one I'm not sure.

Can I disable / remove the ZFS Log SSD's without destroying the entire ZFS configuration and loose all my data? Currently I've got 2x Intel 520-series 60GB SSD's as log drives for my RAIDZ(1) configuration. I'm currently on FreeNAS 8.2-Release but considering to go 8.3-BETA1. I'm using my file-server for all kind of things, like driver files which are very, very small to my entire media library existing of 4-18GB MP4 movies and such.

The Asus P8B-E/4L features 4x Intel 82574L NIC's.