SMB performance issues after 9.3 to 11 upgrade.

[tstorm]

First my hardware stats:

Code:

XeonE3-1231 v3 @ 3.40GHz
ASRock E3C226D2I Mini ITX
Mushkin 16GB USB 3.0 Bootx2 mirrored
Crucial 16GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600
5x4TB HGSTs 7200RPM in Z2
All network connections are Gig.

Since upgrading versions I've noticed videos have been pausing while watching them (over SMB) Plex seems to be fine. I also notice when transferring files the transfer speed will be consistent then drop way down only to recover shortly after. It could very well be that these issues were present before but only now exacerbated after the update as sometimes during movies they would glitch out a bit but nowhere near as bad as it has been.

Not sure what to check first, as it could be the hard drives, could be the network. Could someone point me in the right direction on how to best test hard drive speeds and the best way to iperf?

 

[Ericloewe]

Since upgrading versions I've noticed videos have been pausing while watching them (over SMB)

With what?

 

[tstorm]

You name it, VLC, Kodi, default windows movie player. But it's not just videos, transferring large files will transfer fine and then drop down to a trickle and rebound again. I think this is what is causing the videos to pause up.

 

[Ericloewe]

Okay, just checking. VLC is infamous for having poor defaults for network playback (even though it's the Video LAN Client...).

You'll want to run iperf for a longer period to try and catch momentary glitches, if any exist. The jperf GUI is decently easy to use and beats going through the man page for an hour. The FreeNAS manual has basic instructions, too. You'll want to check both directions, maybe try the iperf server on both your FreeNAS server and your client. Also, run some four connections simultaneously - on some systems, a single connection in iperf has a hard time pushing gigabit.

 

[tstorm]

Looking fine on iperf, getting consistent speeds, no drop outs. Probably disks. I do have compression turned on, I wonder if that might have something to do with it.

 

[Ericloewe]

Also consider running it for an hour or something like that.

I do have compression turned on, I wonder if that might have something to do with it.

No. For compressible data, it just makes storage faster (CPUs are much faster than disks). In this case, incompressible data, it's not even stored compressed, so the impact on reading is effectively zero.

You might want to go through your disks' SMART data and see if they're all healthy. Not-quite-healthy disks can often silently degrade performance a lot.

 

[tstorm]

No issues with SMART tests, also did a dd test. Wrote a 20GB file in 7.5 seconds, read it in 2.3. However, not ready to mark this as solved yet, but it may be solved. Just today I ran into some permissions issues, I had to redo some settings (adding zfsacl and zfs_space) Now it seems to be back to normal. Not 100% sure, still need to do some testing, but maybe working now.

 

[tstorm]

Nope not fixed, sigh

 

[tstorm]

ok new info. When transferring and I get the slow down, under running processes, the ZFS command shows up (with a state of zio-gt;i if that's important) and a size of around 40MB. OK, so now what?

 

[tstorm]

Just did the DD test again, This time with urandom instead of zero it wrote a 5GB file in 31 seconds (so about 160MB/s) but it took 226 seconds to read the same file. (about .03 MB/s) huh...