Sharing "best practices" with OS X?

ckalisiak

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Jan 23, 2020
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Hello there!

I'm new to FreeNAS, but I've been in the storage and networking infrastructure industry for a couple decades. I've been able to set up a Dell PowerEdge R815 with 72TB of NetApp storage behind it in a RAIDZ3, and share a few ZVOLs to my 10GbE SAN as iSCSI shares. I'm happy with the performance from my other Dell boxes, sustaining a little better than 300MB/sec on writes and 600MB/sec on reads on one of the ZVOL partitions in the NetApp shelf, so we're good there so far.

However, I can't figure out how to obtain a usable performance on my Mac Pro running 10.11 with XtendSAN to one of these same ZVOLs, formatted as "OS X Extended". AJA disk test indicates that the read performance is good, about 500MB/sec, which is fine. However, the best I can consistently sustain on writes is about 75MB/sec, or a quarter of what Windows can do.

I suspect that it's a write caching problem, but I can't find any reliable information on dealing with write cache configuration in OS X. I see references to disabling write caching on USB devices, but I have the opposite problem -- OS X will let me eject the device, so that tells me that OS X considers the iSCSI share as a removable device, and so write caching should be configured conservatively. I've played around with Storage / Pools / Edit Zvol, forcing the "Sync" option on the ZVOL to "Disabled", switched to gzip compression, and of course dedupe is off, but nothing has helped.

So, if you're in an environment that can sustain 300-500MB/sec, and you want to make backups from your Mac (ideally I would like to use Time Machine, but I also have a license for Retrospect 15 on the Mac), what are the best practices? AFP is being deprecated, and SMB is single-threaded, and on the flipside, iSCSI works beautifully on my Dell boxes, so iSCSI makes sense, but maybe not if it's this terrible on write performance under OS X.

Thanks in advance!
Chris
 

jgreco

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Doing block storage on RAIDZ3 is dicey.

 

ckalisiak

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Certainly agree when it comes to write performance from a Mac. Is SMB or AFP or NFS better when dealing with macOS? I guess now that I iterate the lot of them, NFS is possibly a better option. Is it preferred to share NFS mounts as file extents? Or is sharing a ZVol over NFS just as supported?

Thanks,
Chris
 

jgreco

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Doing the file storage natively on ZFS is always preferable. Apple has deprecated AFP and doesn't seem to encourage NFS, apparently preferring to focus on supporting the one thing they've always been weak at, CIFS. Not aware of any awesomely happy solutions on OS X.
 

ckalisiak

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Ah. Well, the performance of the ZVol is unusable, so if there aren’t any configuration options in macOS, then I have to try something different. Of the other sharing options,which would you say are the least worst?

Thanks,
Chris
 

jgreco

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I'm partial to NFS but that's because I'm a UNIX guy.

Sometimes just giving in to the inevitable is the way to go. I suspect at some point that Apple is intending to drop AFP, and is probably only supporting it now in order to make sure they don't obsolete Time Capsules that they were selling just a few years ago. I imagine AFP has no more than 5 years left.

Therefore it probably makes sense to tackle CIFS. It is what Apple wants you to use. It also brings better compatibility with Windows PC's with it.
 

seanm

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Mac OS X 10.11 is rather old, maybe Apple has improved SMB performance since then...
 

ckalisiak

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Here's a screenshot, it's the same performance, so I just aborted the AJA test.
 

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ckalisiak

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Mac OS X 10.11 is rather old, maybe Apple has improved SMB performance since then...

The performance problems I was seeing when I posted initially was with iSCSI, but iSCSI and SMB both appear to exhibit the same performance problems. The infrastructure is sound, because I can hit an HGST SAS SSD ZVol at 400+MB/sec on reads and writes, and the Z3 can sustain 300+MB/sec on reads and writes from a Dell box, so there's a combination of macOS and FreeNAS that isn't working. It could still be a write caching issue, but I don't know enough about macOS' write caching configuration to know how to adjust it.

Chris
 

ckalisiak

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Jan 23, 2020
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Looks like the magic is AFP with a file extent. Everything else was unusably slow.

Chris
 

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